[omniORB] CORBA performance on InfiniBand network

[Duncan Grisby]

On Mon, 2015-08-03 at 05:01 +0000, Soundararajan, Krishna wrote:

> There have been two variables which were used. Each remote call is
> repeated until the total data sent is 8GB
> a)      Remote calls are made with different argument sizes from
> 1kB,2kB,4kB upto 1mB.
> b)       Number of client threads is varied from 1 to 32(Each thread
> splitting totalData/NumOfThreads)
>  
> The surprising result is that CORBA performance on 10GeT is better
> than Infiniband.

omniORB doesn't know anything about your underlying interconnect
technology. It just uses TCP sockets.

One possible issue with a multithreaded client is that by default
omniORB makes at most 5 concurrent calls to a single server. With 32
threads, most of them will be waiting for the others for most of the
time. Look at the maxGIOPConnectionPerServer parameter:

http://www.omniorb.net/omni42/omniORB/omniORB004.html#toc23

Try setting the parameter to 32 (or higher) and see if throughput
improves.

[...]
> With this results, I have following questions.
>      1. I read in several old articles in internet that ORB kills the
>         throughput because of inefficient memory copies and
>         marshalling/unmarshalling.

Those old articles are generally written by people with some sort of
agenda, to push their way of doing things in preference to CORBA.

omniORB tries really hard to avoid unnecessary overheads. If you are
sending big bulk transfers, and the data types are suitable, it
transmits the data directly out of the application memory, rather than
going through an intermediate buffer. In cases where it can't do that,
it still tries to manage its buffers as efficiently as possible.

>          In 10Gb Ethernet and 1 Gb Ethernet, I do see almost  90%
>         utilization(CORBA compared to ethernet). But IB card give less
>         than 25% of network utilization. What is causing this
>         overhead?

How does the timing compare if you do just one single really big call,
with an application buffer containing a sequence<octet>?

>         Though CORBA is meant to be used for remote method calls, we
>         are amazed with its superiority in serializing. Can we use it
>         as alternative for socket data transfer with amnual
>         serializing code? Is CORBA suitable in high bandwidth
>         networks for data transfer?

As I say, omniORB's serialising code is quite finely tuned. You
certainly could write special-case code that was more efficient, but it
is rarely worth the effort. CORBA (at least with omniORB) is definitely
suitable for high bandwidth data transfer.

Cheers,

Duncan.

-- 
 -- Duncan Grisby         --
  -- duncan at grisby.org     --
   -- http://www.grisby.org --