From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list xfs); Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:50:06 -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 m2NEnYi7007666 for ; Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:49:35 -0700 Received: from web52006.mail.re2.yahoo.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by cuda.sgi.com (Spam Firewall) with SMTP id 0C899125E5BA for ; Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:50:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from web52006.mail.re2.yahoo.com (web52006.mail.re2.yahoo.com [206.190.49.253]) by cuda.sgi.com with SMTP id FoSIoUbcE0tdBfwY for ; Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:50:07 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:50:06 -0700 (PDT) From: "Hendrik ." Subject: Poor VMWare disk performance on XFS partition MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <876423.51989.qm@web52006.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Sender: xfs-bounce@oss.sgi.com Errors-to: xfs-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: xfs To: xfs@oss.sgi.com 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. The first thing that I noticed is that when I shut down the virtual machine it takes a very long time after the machine seems to be shut down until the VMware window becomes responsive again. In the mean time there is heavy disk I/O. I found out that VMware seems to write some kind of memory map on the host hard disk which get heavily fragmented. The removal of this file is probably very I/O intensive which causes the delay. This is very annoying but not really a problem as it only happens when a virtual machine is shut down. But there seems to be another problem when running the guest operating system itself. I made two exact copies of a Windows XP virtual machine on two hard disks of the same type, size and brand. The first hard disk had a XFS partition to host the virtual machine, the seconds harddisk was formatted as EXT3. The XFS partition has no fragmentation at all thus all files only consisted of 1 extent. The EXT3 files were a bit fragmented but this was only marginal (some larger disk image files consisted of 17 extents where 16 was optimal, reported by 'filefrag'). Then I ran the virtual machines one by one and started a defragmentation program to cause a lot of I/O on the guest operating system. Defragmentation of the XP host running from the EXT3 partition took only 2m36 but the exact same guest on the XFS partition took 10m5 to complete. On the EXT3 partition hardly any noise was heard from the drive heads as if the host operating system was caching and delaying the I/O operations. On the XFS host however a lot of noise was heard as if the harddisk was trashing heavily. The machine I ran the tests on had the following specifications: - Dual core AMD Athlon64 5200+ - 2 GB memory - 2x 80 GB Samsung IDE harddisk - Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) 64-bit - Standard stock Ubuntu kernel - VMware workstation 6.0.2 build-59824 The guest was a bare Windows XP SP-2 installation, running O&O defrag 10. Can anyone give me some information what might be causing this massive slowdown? Regards, Hendrik van den Boogaard ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping