From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list xfs); Mon, 24 Mar 2008 06:59:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from cuda.sgi.com (cuda1.sgi.com [192.48.168.28]) by oss.sgi.com (8.12.11.20060308/8.12.11/SuSE Linux 0.7) with ESMTP id m2ODxbxq010695 for ; Mon, 24 Mar 2008 06:59:38 -0700 Received: from slurp.thebarn.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by cuda.sgi.com (Spam Firewall) with ESMTP id 4C9E5CE4F4B for ; Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:00:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from slurp.thebarn.com (cattelan-host202.dsl.visi.com [208.42.117.202]) by cuda.sgi.com with ESMTP id y9Pv9PXDtAqvupZf for ; Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:00:10 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <47E7B3E4.1020205@thebarn.com> Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:00:04 -0500 From: Russell Cattelan MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: Poor VMWare disk performance on XFS partition References: <876423.51989.qm@web52006.mail.re2.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: xfs-bounce@oss.sgi.com Errors-to: xfs-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: xfs To: Jan Derfinak Cc: "Hendrik ." , xfs@oss.sgi.com Jan Derfinak wrote: > On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Hendrik . wrote: > > >> I've been converting some of my drives from EXT3 to >> XFS a while ago. Now I notice poor disk performance >> when using XFS as underlying filesystem for a VMware >> virtual drive. I did some experiments and it really >> seems to be the XFS filesystem 'trashing' the speed of >> a VMware Windows XP guest. >> > > Mount XFS partition with "nobarrier" option. I'm using also > logbufs=8,logbsize=256k for vmware. > > jan > > I can verify that ... barriers are killers when running vmware guest disk/memory images. The preallocation would also help out quite bit if you don't mind dedicating the disk space vs the sparse file method, which allow for over subscribing the physical space. Going through once in a while and shutting down the guests and defragmenting it a good idea. I would be interested to find out the results of seekwatcher on shutdown but I have also seen the long shutdowns. -Russell