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+Low Latency Tunning Suggestion
+==============================
+
+The correct configuration is critical for improving the NFV performance/latency.
+Even working on the same codebase, configurations can cause wildly different
+performance/latency results.
+
+There are many combinations of configurations, from hardware configuration to
+Operating System configuration and application level configuration. And there
+is no one simple configuration that works for every case. To tune a specific
+scenario, it's important to know the behaviors of different configurations and
+their impact.
+
+Platform Configuration
+----------------------
+
+Some hardware features can be configured through firmware interface(like BIOS)
+but others may not be configurable (e.g. SMI on most platforms).
+
+* **Power management:**
+ Most power management related features save power at the
+ expensive of latency. These features include: IntelĀ®Turbo Boost Technology,
+ Enhanced IntelĀ®SpeedStep, Processor C state and P state. Normally they should
+ be disabled but, depending on the real-time application design and latency
+ requirements, there might be some features can be enabled if the impact on
+ deterministic execution of the workload is small.
+
+* **Hyper-Threading:**
+ The logic cores that share resource with other logic cores can introduce
+ latency so the recommendation is to disable this feature for realtime use
+ cases.
+
+* **Legacy USB Support/Port 60/64 Emulation:**
+ These features involve some emulation in firmware and can introduce random
+ latency. It is recommended that they are disabled.
+
+* **SMI (System Management Interrupt):**
+ SMI runs outside of the kernel code and can potentially cause
+ latency. It is a pity there is no simple way to disable it. Some vendors may
+ provide related switches in BIOS but most machines do not have this capability.
+
+Operating System Configuration
+------------------------------
+
+* **CPU isolation:**
+ To achieve deterministic latency, dedicated CPUs should be allocated for
+ realtime application. This can be achieved by isolating cpus from kernel
+ scheduler. Please refer to
+ http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt#L1608
+ for more information.
+
+* **Memory allocation:**
+ Memory shoud be reserved for realtime applications and usually hugepage should
+ be used to reduce page fauts/TLB misses.
+
+* **IRQ affinity:**
+ All the non-realtime IRQs should be affinitized to non realtime CPUs to
+ reduce the impact on realtime CPUs. Some OS distributions contain an irqbalance
+ deamon which balances the IRQs among all the cores dynamically. It should be
+ disabled as well.
+
+* **Device assignment for VM:**
+ If a device is used in a VM, then device passthrough is desirable. In this case,
+ the IOMMU should be enabled.
+
+* **Tickless:**
+ Frequent clock ticks cause latency. CONFIG_NOHZ_FULL should be enabled in the
+ linux kernel. With CONFIG_NOHZ_FULL, the physical CPU will trigger many fewer
+ clock tick interrupts(currently, 1 tick per second). This can reduce latency
+ because each host timer interrupt triggers a VM exit from guest to host which
+ causes performance/latency impacts.
+
+* **TSC:**
+ Mark TSC clock source as reliable. A TSC clock source that seems to be
+ unreliable causes the kernel to continuously enable the clock source watchdog
+ to check if TSC frequency is still correct. On recent Intel platforms with
+ Constant TSC/Invariant TSC/Synchronized TSC, the TSC is reliable so the
+ watchdog is useless but cause latency.
+
+* **Idle:**
+ The poll option forces a polling idle loop that can slightly improve the
+ performance of waking up an idle CPU.
+
+* **RCU_NOCB:**
+ RCU is a kernel synchronization mechanism. Refer to
+ http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/RCU/whatisRCU.txt for more
+ information. With RCU_NOCB, the impact from RCU to the VNF will be reduced.
+
+* **Disable the RT throttling:**
+ RT Throttling is a Linux kernel mechanism that
+ occurs when a process or thread uses 100% of the core, leaving no resources for
+ the Linux scheduler to execute the kernel/housekeeping tasks. RT Throttling
+ increases the latency so should be disabled.
+
+* **NUMA configuration:**
+ To achieve the best latency. CPU/Memory and device allocated for realtime
+ application/VM should be in the same NUMA node.