On 7/4/2025 8:26 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
Steve Sistare <steven.sist...@oracle.com> writes:

Using qom-list and qom-get to get all the nodes and property values in a
QOM tree can take multiple seconds because it requires 1000's of individual
QOM requests.  Some managers fetch the entire tree or a large subset
of it when starting a new VM, and this cost is a substantial fraction of
start up time.

To reduce this cost, consider QAPI calls that fetch more information in
each call:
   * qom-list-get: given a path, return a list of properties and values.
   * qom-list-getv: given a list of paths, return a list of properties and
     values for each path.
   * qom-tree-get: given a path, return all descendant nodes rooted at that
     path, with properties and values for each.

In all cases, a returned property is represented by ObjectPropertyValue,
with fields name, type, and value.  If an error occurs when reading a value
the value field is omitted.  Thus an error for one property will not cause a
bulk fetch operation to fail.

To evaluate each method, I modified scripts/qmp/qom-tree to use the method,
verified all methods produce the same output, and timed each using:

   qemu-system-x86_64 -display none \
     -chardev socket,id=monitor0,path=/tmp/vm1.sock,server=on,wait=off \
     -mon monitor0,mode=control &

   time qom-tree -s /tmp/vm1.sock > /dev/null

I only measured once per method, but the variation is low after a warm up run.
The 'real - user - sys' column is a proxy for QEMU CPU time.

method               real(s)   user(s)   sys(s)  (real - user - sys)(s)
qom-list / qom-get   2.048     0.932     0.057   1.059
qom-list-get         0.402     0.230     0.029   0.143
qom-list-getv        0.200     0.132     0.015   0.053
qom-tree-get         0.143     0.123     0.012   0.008

qom-tree-get is the clear winner, reducing elapsed time by a factor of 14X,
and reducing QEMU CPU time by 132X.

qom-list-getv is slower when fetching the entire tree, but can beat
qom-tree-get when only a subset of the tree needs to be fetched (not shown).
qom-list-get is shown for comparison only, and is not included in this series.

How badly do you need the additional performance qom-tree-get can give
you in certain cases?

I'm asking because I find qom-list-getv *much* simpler.

I would be content with qom-list-getv, so I will drop qom-tree-get.
qom-list-getv needs ObjectPropertyValue and qom_list_add_property_value
from the qom-tree-get patch, so I will respond to those comments.

- Steve

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