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When VMware Performance Fails, Try BSD Jails
Siker writes in to tell us about the experience of email transfer service YippieMove, which ditched VMware and switched to FreeBSD jails. "We doubled the amount of memory per server, we quadrupled SQLite's internal buffers, we turned off SQLite auto-vacuuming, we turned off synchronization, we added more database indexes. We were confused. Certainly we had expected a performance difference between running our software in a VM compared to running on the metal, but that it could be as much as 10X was a wake-up call."
Oh the irony
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The difference between a good ratio and a bad ratio between vm's and hardware is often due to the need in some combinations to run every vm's IO state through the BIOS in order to complete an IO. That's a lot of interrupt state passing and subsequent process rescheduling. You get a multiplier when multiple vm's are all competing for the same trap completion and queues grow as a result. I know that Intel at least has a chip set that optimises this (they call the feature VT) . Ring 0 instruction completion has a huge multiplying effect on virtualisation efficiency. Right chip set = good, wrong chip set = sorta.
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