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    VMware Performance Problem: x64 Host + x86 Guest - Arth1 come help plz^^

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by sniper_sung, Nov 8, 2009.

  1. sniper_sung

    sniper_sung Notebook Evangelist

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    I am sorry the title of the post may seem irrelevant in this sub-forum, but I decided to post here because I know there is an expert in this area - Arth1, so hopefully here I could draw his attention and ask for help :)

    I am suffering from some weird performance impact:

    Originally my vaio z was running Windows Server 2008 SP2 32-bit as my host OS. In VMware Workstation 6.5.3 I was running Windows 2000 Pro SP4 32-bit as a guest OS. The performance of the virtual machine was normal. e.g. when I ran Fritz Chess Benchmark, I got 3700 kilonodes / sec in the virtual machine, and I got 3800 kilonodes / sec in the physical machine, which means the efficiency of the guest-host translation was very high.

    Now I am running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit as my host OS. In VMware Workstation 6.5.3 I am still running the identical Windows 2000 Pro 32-bit as a guest OS. However the performance of the virtual machine is downgraded seriously. e.g. when I run Fritz Chess Benchmark, I only get 1900 kilonodes / sec in the virtual machine, while I still have 3800 kilonodes / sec in the physical machine. Regarding this performance issue I have also tested SuperPI and I have got the same results that the efficiency of the guest is only about 50% (for both dual core mode and solo core mode).

    Now with such 64-bit host and 32-bit guest setup, I have also noticed that the CPU load of the host OS is usually very high. Whenever the CPU load of the guest OS is only about 30%, the CPU load of the host OS reaches 100% easily. What happened to my system?

    I still haven't done careful benchmarks in a 32-bit Linux guest OS yet. I wonder if this is a problem with my hardware (like CPU bug), or software (like v7.0 will fix this)? Or perhaps it's simply an architecture problem that cannot be avoided?

    Any help is appreciated, thanks! :)
     
    sniper_sung, Nov 8, 2009
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  2. sniper_sung

    sniper_sung Notebook Evangelist

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    PS: Forgot to mention this:

    Tried both "Binary Translation" and "VT-x", same results. "Binary Translation" is slightly faster than "VT-x" in such case.
     
    sniper_sung, Nov 8, 2009
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