[Unbound-users] High number of system context switches

Jan-Frode Myklebust janfrode at tanso.net
Thu Apr 10 14:30:57 UTC 2014


Hi, 

I'm considering switching from bind to unbound, and have been testing it
on one of our recursive dns servers. Our servers are KVM virtual machines,
running RHEL6.5, 12GB memory, 8 cpu cores, with unbound-1.4.21-1.el6.x86_64
from EPEL.

We typically have high time periods of 12-14k qps on our DNS-servers, and
it's been working fairly well on bind, but with unbound we seem to get into
trouble when the qps exceed 7k. We then see a clear drop in the request
rate, and clients move over to the secondary dns server.

The only problem we've noticed on the unbound server is that context
switches/s is very high. pidstat for unbound doesn't report high
cswch/s, but the system does..

Here's "sar -w" from yesterday evening running unbound:

kl. 19.00 +0200    proc/s   cswch/s
kl. 19.10 +0200      3,70 116480,30
kl. 19.20 +0200      3,47 123118,48
kl. 19.30 +0200      3,67 128948,60
kl. 19.40 +0200      3,45 125471,32
kl. 19.50 +0200      3,69 132641,76
kl. 20.00 +0200      3,48 140126,75

while the day before on bind:

kl. 19.00 +0200      1,90  64801,51
kl. 19.10 +0200      2,15  64550,78
kl. 19.20 +0200      1,94  64389,23
kl. 19.30 +0200      2,19  64369,56
kl. 19.40 +0200      1,92  64211,15
kl. 19.50 +0200      2,09  64087,84
kl. 20.00 +0200      1,91  63691,33


Any ideas for what we should try to improve this?

Full unbound.conf stripped for comments:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
server:
verbosity: 1
statistics-interval: 60
statistics-cumulative: yes
extended-statistics: yes
num-threads: 8
interface: 0.0.0.0
interface: ::0
interface-automatic: yes
outgoing-range: 4096
outgoing-port-permit: 32768-65535
outgoing-port-avoid: 0-32767
max-udp-size: 3072
msg-cache-size: 4G
num-queries-per-thread: 4096
rrset-cache-size: 8G
cache-min-ttl: 2
do-ip4: yes
do-ip6: yes
do-udp: yes
do-tcp: yes
access-control: 0.0.0.0/0 allow
access-control: ::0/0 allow
chroot: ""
username: "unbound"
directory: "/etc/unbound"
log-time-ascii: yes
pidfile: "/var/run/unbound/unbound.pid"
harden-glue: yes
harden-dnssec-stripped: yes
harden-below-nxdomain: yes
harden-referral-path: yes
use-caps-for-id: no
unwanted-reply-threshold: 10000000
prefetch: yes
prefetch-key: yes
rrset-roundrobin: yes
minimal-responses: no
dlv-anchor-file: "/etc/unbound/dlv.isc.org.key"
trusted-keys-file: /etc/unbound/keys.d/*.key
auto-trust-anchor-file: "/var/lib/unbound/root.anchor"
val-clean-additional: yes
val-permissive-mode: no
val-log-level: 2
include: /etc/unbound/local.d/*.conf
remote-control:
control-enable: yes
control-interface: 127.0.0.1
control-interface: ::1
server-key-file: "/etc/unbound/unbound_server.key"
server-cert-file: "/etc/unbound/unbound_server.pem"
control-key-file: "/etc/unbound/unbound_control.key"
control-cert-file: "/etc/unbound/unbound_control.pem"
include: /etc/unbound/conf.d/*.conf
-------------------------------------------------------------------




   -jf



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