Large lists in Clixon

Background
Overview
[Test descriptions]#test-descriptions)

Background

Clixon is a configuration management tool. In this paper the case of a large number of "flat" list and leaf-list entries are investigated. There may be other scaling usecases, such as large configuratin "depth", large number of requesting clients, etc. However, these are not investigated here.

Overview

The basic case is a large list, according to the following Yang specification:

   list y {
      key "a";
      leaf a {
         type int32;
      }
      leaf b {
         type string;
      }
   }

where a is a unique key and b is a payload, useful in replace operations.

There is also a leaf-list as follows:

    leaf-list c {
       type string;
    }

XML lists with N elements are generated based on this configuration, eg for N=10:

   <y><a>0</a><b>0</b></y>
   <y><a>1</a><b>1</b></y>
   <y><a>2</a><b>2</b></y>
   <y><a>3</a><b>3</b></y>
   <y><a>4</a><b>4</b></y>
   <y><a>5</a><b>5</b></y>
   <y><a>6</a><b>6</b></y>
   <y><a>7</a><b>7</b></y>
   <y><a>8</a><b>8</b></y>
   <y><a>9</a><b>9</b></y>

Requests are made using a random function, a request on the list above will on the form:

   curl -G http://localhost/restconf/data/y=(rnd%$N)

Test descriptions

Limitations

Test were not made using CLI interaction.

Setup

The setup consisted of the following components running on the same machine:

A clixon backend daemon
A clixon restconf daemon
An nginx daemon daemon
A netconf client program
curl client
A bash terminal and test script plot_perf.sh
Gnuplot for generating plots

Config file

The following Clixon config file was used:

<clixon-config xmlns="http://clicon.org/config">
  <CLICON_CONFIGFILE>$cfg</CLICON_CONFIGFILE>
  <CLICON_YANG_DIR>$dir</CLICON_YANG_DIR>
  <CLICON_YANG_DIR>/usr/local/share/clixon</CLICON_YANG_DIR>
  <CLICON_YANG_MODULE_MAIN>scaling</CLICON_YANG_MODULE_MAIN>
  <CLICON_SOCK>/usr/local/var/example/example.sock</CLICON_SOCK>
  <CLICON_BACKEND_PIDFILE>/usr/local/var/example/example.pidfile</CLICON_BACKEND_PIDFILE>
  <CLICON_RESTCONF_PRETTY>false</CLICON_RESTCONF_PRETTY>
  <CLICON_XMLDB_DIR>$dir</CLICON_XMLDB_DIR>
  <CLICON_XMLDB_PRETTY>false</CLICON_XMLDB_PRETTY>
</clixon-config>

where $dir and $cfgare local files. For more info see [plot_perf.sh].

Testcases

All tests measure the "real" time of a command on a lightly loaded machine using the Linux command time(1).

The following tests were made (for each architecture and protocol):

Write N entries in one single operation. (With an empty datastore)
Read N entries in one single operation. (With a datastore of N entries)
Commit N entries (With a candidate of N entries and empty running)
Read 1 entry (In a datastore of N entries)
Write/Replace 1 entry (In a datastore of N entries)
Delete 1 entry (In a datastore of N entries)

Protocols

The tests are made using:

Netconf[RFC6241] and
Restconf[RFC8040]. Notably, CLI tests are for future study.

Architectures

The tests were made on the following hardware, all running Ubuntu Linux:

[i686] dual Intel Core Duo processor (IBM Thinkpad X60), 3GB memory
arm 32-bit (Raspberry PI 3)
x86 64-bit (Intel NUC)

Operating systems

On i686:

Linux version 4.4.0-143-generic (buildd@lgw01-amd64-037) (gcc version 5.4.0 20160609 (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.10) ) #169-Ubuntu SMP Thu Feb 7 07:56:51 UTC 2019

Results

References

RFC6241 "Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF)" RFC8040 "RESTCONF Protocol" i686 plot_perf.sh Test script

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