Virtualizing Cuts Web App Performance 43%

czei writes "This just-released research report, Load Testing a Virtual Web Application, looks at the effects of virtualization on a typical ASP Web application, using VMWare on Linux to host a Windows OS and IIS web server. While virtualizing the server made it easier to manage, the number of users the virtualized Web app could handle dropped by 43%. The article also shows interesting graphs of how hyper-threading affected the performance of IIS." The report urges readers to take this research as a data point. No optimization was done on host or guest OS parameters.

Comments

Re:Virtualize this

[Fordiman]

I do like the idea of a variably sized beowulf cluster running a floating number of package (LAMP) servers. Get more clients? Add more VLAMPs. Things slowing down? Add more hardware.

You still take performance hits, but if you can scale your system by just adding cheap commodity systems, that works. Plug it in, boot it off a CD, and let the Cluster take control.