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RE: [Xen-users] Large server, Xen limitations

On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Robert Dunkley wrote:

Do you have a link or details of an example for the cygwin compiles you
use as a sort of benchmark?

Unfortunately not. I did my initial testing when I installed the Dom0 last July. I didn't keep records as it was a single-developer setup (me), although of course I recorded all my measurements at the time.

I am compiling a package (of my own design) that is comprised of about 500K lines of C and C++ code (mostly C), with about 1200 separate source and header files and about 100 makefiles. It is a fully native application on Windows, but I use cygwin with gcc/g++ -mno-cygwin and GNU make since the same makefiles can then be used on Windows as on the other platforms that are supported (RHEL3/4/5, CentOS 3/4/5, Fedora, Tru64, OSX). On Linux guests, the sources come from an NFS-mounted volume, and the objects go to a (different) NFS-mounted volume. On Windows, the same sources come from a Samba share, and the objects go to a (different) Samba share. Although I have 33 guests at present, I do the build on only 14 of them; the others are for something else. The NFS server and Samba server are on the Dom0 (CentOS 5.2 x86_64, Dell PE2900 with 8 cores and 24 GB).

I found that 64-bit HVM guests were about 30% faster than 32-bit guests (where "faster" in this case relates to the elapsed time of a full build). In their current NFS-root configuration, 32-bit guests are a little faster than 64-bit, and 64-bit guests are about 50% faster than the same guests in HVM form. Performance of HVM Windows guests was dreadful until I installed PV drivers.

I still have four fully-HVM guests (RHEL3, RHEL4, 32 and 64 bit). I'll do some more timings and will report back.

Steve

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