Re: [9fans] 9p server to multiply 9p messages?

[ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On Mon, May 30, 2022 at 12:21 AM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:
> 9p itself is low performance but that is a separate issue.

Bakul, what are the units? It might be helpful to quantify this
statement. Are you possibly conflating Plan 9 file systems being slow
and 9p being slow?

As Rob pointed out in 2013, "If go install is slow on Plan 9, it's
because Plan 9's file system is
slow (which it is and always has been)", so slowness in Plan 9 file
systems is to be expected.

9p itself does have its limits, which is why Bell Labs Antwerp started
an effort in 2011 to replace it, but the new work never went very far.

I also know of a number of efforts in the virtualization world where
9p was discarded for performance reasons. It's hard to argue with the
100x performance improvement that comes with virtiofs, for example.

Gvisor is replacing 9p: https://github.com/google/gvisor/milestone/6.
Although, in the latter case, I would argue the problem is more with
Linux limitations than 9p limitations -- linux can't seem to walk more
than one pathname component at a time, for example, since it has the
old school namei loop.

But I'm wondering if you have a measurement with numbers.

For rough order of magnitude, HPC file systems can deliver 10 Gbytes/
second for file reads nowadays, but getting there took 20 years of
work. When we ran Plan 9 on Blue Gene, with the 6 Gbyte/second
toroidal mesh connect for each node, we never came remotely close to
that figure.

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