VirtualBox 4.2 performance in Ubuntu 12.04
12 Jan 2013I am using VirtualBox for a long time now, although i know there is an performance penalty i never bothered to check how big it was. I got curious and though maybe I should test this to see how it works out. This is not an scientific test or anything fancy just a simple tests that show a difference in performance between the hardware and VirtualBox 4.2.
The machine I am running this test on is:
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T @ 3.20GHz (6 Cores), Memory: 8192MB, Disk: In Raid 0 = 250GB Seagate ST3250410AS + 250GB HDS722525VLSA80, Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6800 1024MB
The VirtualBox:
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T @ 3.19GHz (6 Cores), Memory: 5120MB, Disk: 21GB VBOX HDD (on the raid disks), Graphics: InnoTek VirtualBox
I am using Phoronix Test Suite for testing and i am running the “workstation”; suite.
The results:
| Test | Hardware | VirtualBox(6 cores) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apache Benchmark [system] | 25364.12 | 7079.97 | 72% |
| NGINX [system] | 30298.94 | 11886.01 | 60% |
| PostgreSQL [system] | 236.85 | 193.23 | 18% |
| PostMark [disk] | 3571 | 213 | 94% |
| IOzone Write [disk] | 62.10 | 41.22 | 33% |
| IOzone Read [disk] | 4309.98 | 1068.72 | 75% |
| C-Ray [cpu] | 58.72 | 125.20 | 113% |
| POV-Ray [cpu] | 959 | 817 | +14% |
| Crafty [cpu] | 96.06 | 0.01 ?? | .. |
| PHPBench [system] | 67250 | 43562 | 35% |
| GraphicsMagick [cpu] | 142 | 89 | 37% |
| OpenSSL [cpu] | 104.13 | 19.20 | 81% |
| John The Ripper [cpu] | 5418 | 3684 | 32% |
| MAFFT [cpu] | 7.69 | 22.35 | 190% |
| Himeno [cpu] | 625.87 | 518.17 | 17% |
| HMMer [cpu] | 14.34 | 21.58 | 50% |
| LAME MP3 Enc | 19.47 | 24.76 | 27% |
| FFmpeg [cpu] | 28.70 | 41.94 | 46% |
| LZMA Compres [cpu] | 174.19 | 286.20 | 64% |
| BZIP2 Compres [cpu] | 10.72 | 15.79 | 47% |
| NAS EP.B [cpu] | 152.25 | 110.69 | 27% |
| NAS LU.A [cpu] | 7111.38 | 6199.18 | 12% |
| Stream Copy [memory] | 9223.42 | 8976.57 | 2% |
| Stream Scale [memory] | 8870.21 | 8548.39 | 3% |
| Stream Add [memory] | 9717.47 | 9292.04 | 4% |
| Triad [memory] | 9974.82 | 9511.68 | 4% |
Looking at the table i find the performance penalty very high actually, memory is the only part where the performance differences can be ignored. Does this mean i shouldn’t use VirtualBox, NO. It just means that if i am going to have any really heavy long running tasks i better not run them in an VM if i want speed. If you are running small tasks or daily stuff the performance drops are manageable and not always in the way.