Re: HTTP performance compared to VMware ESXi

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Joel Carnat<joel%carnat.net@localhost> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm on my way to replace my personal LAN from VMware ESXi to Xen (now that
> Xen supports speedstep :-)
> I do this for two main reasons ; first is that I prefer to run NetBSD (hence
> NetBSD/xen) ; then I felt like my NetBSD virtual machines were a bit slow
> running in VMware. I just couldn't mesure it. It was just an impression.
> Windows Server VMs were faster on VMware than on Xen though.
>
> Anyway, I'm ready to switch so I have both environment running and ran a few
> 'ab' command (ApacheBench/2.3) from my Mac workstation.
> And the results are really different.
>
> I ran "ab -n 500 -c 10 -k" on a dokuwiki webpage (PHP5) that parses a few
> RSS feeds (from Yahoo Pipes) and present them on the Web page.
>
> The VMware instance (netbsd-4, 512MB of RAM), running lighttpd/1.4.20, gave
> the following results:
> Concurrency Level:      10
> Time taken for tests:   57.070 seconds
> Complete requests:      500
> Keep-Alive requests:    476
> Total transferred:      11851353 bytes
> HTML transferred:       11606474 bytes
> Requests per second:    8.76 [#/sec] (mean)
> Time per request:       1141.394 [ms] (mean)
> Time per request:       114.139 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
> Transfer rate:          202.80 [Kbytes/sec] received
>
> The Xen domU (netbsd-5, 512MB of RAM), running lighttpd/1.4.22, gave the
> following results:
> Concurrency Level:      10
> Time taken for tests:   18.929 seconds
> Complete requests:      500
> Keep-Alive requests:    1
> Total transferred:      11857528 bytes
> HTML transferred:       11626500 bytes
> Requests per second:    26.41 [#/sec] (mean)
> Time per request:       378.575 [ms] (mean)
> Time per request:       37.857 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
> Transfer rate:          611.75 [Kbytes/sec] received
>
> I also tried with a static content page (although generated via PHP). The
> difference is slightly less but still there (34 RQ/s vs 19 RQ/s).
>
> I have tuned the VMware instance to use a wm0 interface, but still then, the
> test show a really huge difference.
> Would this be due to the difference between netbsd-4 and netbsd-5 or did one
> notice the difference too between VMware and Xen ?
>
> This is a nice result in my case but from the Enterprise point of view,
> where VMware is more used than NetBSD/xen, this would prevent NetBSD from
> being chosen as a virtual machine :-(
>


There's a good chance that NetBSD 5 is much faster than NetBSD 4.  If
you have the time it's worth doing a vmware install of NetBSD 5 and
running the same tests.