Changing clock type on the Xen based EC2 instance

We can change the clock type on Xen based EC2 instances to get better performance than the standard Xen clock source. You will notice that the speed for Xen and Nitro/KVM instances will be close to identical after this change.

Code to change the clock source

echo "tsc" > /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource

This changes the default time clock from xen to tsc (Time Stamp Counter), which is considered the best practice for Xen based EC2 instances.

Using SSM to run the clock change document

1. Open the AWS Console (https://console.awa.amazon.com)
2. In the “Find Services” search bar, type “systems manager” and press enter
3. Under “Instances & Nodes” click on “Run Command” and on the left side of the screen again click on “Run a command”
4. In the search bar under Command Document, select “Owner” from the pulldown and then select “Owned by me”.
5. You should see 2 SSM documents that have been created for you by the CloudFormation Template. Click on the one with “setTSCdocument” in the name.
6. Scroll down and under “Targets”, select the checkbox next to the instance that is labeled “XenTimeInstanceTest”
7. Scroll down and uncheck the box that says “Enable writing to an S3 bucket” and then click the “Run” button at the bottom of the screen.
8. You should see the command running on the node selected. Click Refresh until the command is in the “Success” state
9. You can now go back to Step 2 and re-run the tests. You should see the time for the Xen based EC2 instance has dramatically improved from 110 to 24 seconds.