4.3.10 virtio bridged networking performance

[Chris Brown]

virtio with 4.3.10 is totally unusable. This is observed on all host types and different hardware configurations.

Simple Test case: Load an EL or OEL 6.x guest and configure it with a bridged virtio nic. Perform a simple network operation in the guest such making/removing a directory and some files on NFS v3 mounted filesystem in the guest.

EG:

mkdir foobar
time { for i in `seq 0 1000`; do echo foo > foobar/file_${i}; done }
time rm -rf foobar

Windows Host Example

• Windows 7 Dual Intel x5570 CPU 48Gb Ram 10K SAS disks
• SL 6.5 Guest 2 vcpu 4GB RAM 20GB vdi
• With virtio:
  • create

    real: 1m10.749s
    user: 0m0.151s
    system: 0m0.607s
    

  • remove

    real: 0m39.892s
    user: 0m0.000s
    system: 0m0.418s
    

• With 82545EM:
  • create

    real: 0m2.616s
    user: 0m0.119s
    system: 0m0.646s
    

  • remove

    real: 0m1.746s
    user: 0m0.002s
    system: 0m0.540s
    

OEL 6.5 Host Example

• OEL 6.5. Dual Intel e5540 CPU 73Gb Ram 10K SAS disks
• SL 6.5 Guest 2 vcpu 4GB RAM 20GB vdi
• With virtio:
  • create

    real: 1m1.833s
    user: 0m0.131s
    system: 0m0.402s
    

  • remove

    real: 0m31.232s
    user: 0m0.001s
    system: 0m0.401s
    

• With 82545EM:
  • create

    real: 0m2.100s
    user: 0m0.112s
    system: 0m0.623s
    

  • remove

    real: 0m0.931s
    user: 0m0.001s
    system: 0m0.311s
    

[Frank Mehnert]

First, I don't think this is a regression so you will probably get similar results with other VirtualBox releases as well. Though it would be interesting to see how your guests perform with virtio and only one guest CPU assigned. There are known problems with networking and multiprocessor guests.

[Chris Brown]

I did a test with a single vpcu guest on various oracle server hardware (x4170,x4170m2,X3-2) and found it to be roughly the same as the performance of E1000. I took the same guest ran it under KVM with virtio-net and using the same test case results in the operations being ~58% faster under KVM. I also note that enabling HPET under the single CPU guest speeds things up by ~10% and on the multiple cpu guest by ~68%.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.