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Hello everybody,

i am about to sweitch development envirionment from nativ LAMP to LAMP over vb2.0. Therefore I have installed opensuse11 on vb2.0
Since about 5 years now I am working with an very old amd machine with 256MB of RAM and suse8.x. That workes quite OK. Now VB is running on a quad 6600 with fast SATA drive. I have executed a file search with phpdesigner on both systems. The one on the VB is mounted as a samba share. The performance is about 50% slower than on the 5 year old system. Still OK, but it would be great to have that at least at the same spead.

Any ideas on how to increase speed? The VM has 1Gig RAM.

Regards,

Merlin


Hallo zusammen,

ich möchte meine Entwicklungsumgebung von nativ auf virtual umstellen und hab aus dem Grunde opensuse11 server auf virtualbox2.0 installiert. Seit ca. 5 Jahren läuft sehr stabil ein suse8.x server auf einem eher mager ausgestattetem AMD Rechner mit 256MB Ram. Der dient mir als LAMP Umgebung für meine Entwicklung. Nun läuft VB auf einem Quad6600 mit einem schnellen SATA Laufwerk. Man sollte meinen, dass die Performance mind. ebenbürtig ist. Das ist aber leider nicht so. Das Entwicklungsprojekt liegt jeweils auf einem SAMBA share (einmal samba 2.x und einmal das neueste). Mit PHPdesigner benötigt eine Suche nach einem keyword im projekt über doppelt so lange auf der virtualbox Umgebung wie auf dem nativen uraltsystem.

Hat jemand eine Idee wie man die Performance hier steigern kann? Evtl. eine zweite SATA Platte?

Beste Grüße,

Merlin

It would be better to run 2.0.2, but other than that, there are a few things you might want to try.

First, use the SATA emulation and attach the HD to the SATA0 port.
Second, try it with local files. Those should run faster.

What kind of network share is it? Shouldn't really matter, but you never know .

Merlin, welcome to our forum. You might want to have a browse of our Forum Posting Guide which gives general help on searching the forum knowledge base and framing Qs. Thank-you for your English translation.

Now to the substance. If you search the forum for benchmarking then you will see that in general with VBox, HDD I/O is not one of its strengths. It is typically 50% slower then native I?O on Linux hosts. The reason for this is the lack of para-virtualised drivers.

Have you tried configuring for SATA support because this is reported to be a lot faster?

Hello everybody,

thank you for the warm welcome. The hint with the sata controller seams to be the right track. I am using the default IdE primary port.

Now switching to sata seams not that easy. I have selected the option and tried to boot opensuse11 server installation with SATA port 0. That fails of course and to be honest I do not have any idea on how to change that. I did some searching but have not been successful so far. Do you believe it is worth the time, meaning that the performance will be significantly better?

Best regards,

Merlin

PS: I just did a clean new similar installation with a SATA on port 0 and measured hdparm -tT /dev/sda2

IDE:
Timing cached reads: 6144 MB in 1.98 seconds = 3095.34 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 100 MB in 3.03 seconds = 32.99 MB/sec

SATA
cached: 3084,95 MB/s
buffered: 33,62 MB/s

So unfortunatelly it seams just to be slighly faster?!