Postmark Benchmark with Ubuntu Hardy Host and Pardus 2008 Guest Running in KVM Virtual Machine

I did some test today for seeing the disk performance of virtio paravirtual drivers for KVM. Host system is Ubuntu 8.04, stock 2.6.24 kernel, 2 gig ram, 2x250gig raid0 disk, Core2Duo E6300 running at 2.8 Ghz. The guest has only 1 CPU assigned to it.

So, first on the Host:

PostMark v1.51 : 8/14/01
pm>set number 10000
pm>set transactions 20000
pm>set subdirectories 5
pm>set size 500 100000
pm>set read 4096
pm>set write 4096
pm>run
Creating subdirectories...Done
Creating files...Done
Performing transactions..........Done
Deleting files...Done
Deleting subdirectories...Done

and the results:

Time:
122 seconds total
102 seconds of transactions (196 per second)

Files:
20092 created (164 per second)
Creation alone: 10000 files (833 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 10092 files (98 per second)
9935 read (97 per second)
10064 appended (98 per second)
20092 deleted (164 per second)
Deletion alone: 10184 files (1273 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 9908 files (97 per second)

Data:
548.25 megabytes read (4.49 megabytes per second)
1158.00 megabytes written (9.49 megabytes per second)


Results with the same parameters but this time on the Pardus 2008 Guest, running under KVM virtual machine, with virtio drivers enabled on its 2.6.25 kernel:

Time:
137 seconds total
103 seconds of transactions (194 per second)

Files:
20092 created (146 per second)
Creation alone: 10000 files (344 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 10092 files (97 per second)
9935 read (96 per second)
10064 appended (97 per second)
20092 deleted (146 per second)
Deletion alone: 10184 files (2036 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 9908 files (96 per second)

Data:
548.25 megabytes read (4.00 megabytes per second)
1158.00 megabytes written (8.45 megabytes per second)


It proves that the KVM virtual machine with virtio drivers is performing very well, just head-to-head to the native system. I guess some operations which are slower may be due to the guest having only 1 CPU allocated to it.

Pardus 2008, KVM and virtio - Blazing Performance

I've managed to setup my Pardus 2008 Rc1 system as a KVM virtual machine under Ubuntu 8.04. I also managed to enable the built-in virtio drivers (paravirtual drivers) to obtain enhanced performance for disk and network devices.

According to iperf test, I'm obtaining a whopping 1.5 Gpbs uni-direction performance from the network device from/to Host/Guest. This is on a Core2Duo E6300 overclocked to 2.8 Ghz with full CPU utilization.


Let me know if you're interested to know how :)