OpenSolaris guest has high system time overhead

[Scott Fehrman]

We created an image using OpenSolaris 2008.11 (32-bit), MySQL, OpenDS, Glassfish to support applications. After the image boots, the apps have started and "steady state" is reached, the image has 30-35% system time constantly being consumed. We've seen this on vbox 2.0.x, 2.1.x, and 2.2.x.

We've seen this happen on the following Host OS platforms: OpenSolaris on Sun Ultra40 (AMD) Mac OS X on MacBookPro (Intel) Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) on Toshiba Laptop (Intel) Windows XP on Acer Laptop (AMD)

I "profiled the kernel" using a dtrace script and the kernel is calling: unixtsc_read / genunixgethrtime_unscaled A LOT.

I'll attach the output of the script and the dtrace script

This might be related to bug # 894

[Scott Fehrman]

Here is the dtrace script ...

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s
#pragma D option aggsize=256k
#pragma D option bufsize=256k
BEGIN
{
      interval = 30;
}

profile-997
/arg0 && curthread->t_pri != -1/
{
      @[stack(8)] = count();
      @f[func(arg0),func(caller)]=count();
      total++;
}
tick-1sec
/--interval < 0/
{
      trunc(@,100);
      printa(@);
      trunc(@f,100);
      printa(@f);
      printf("total samples == %d\n",total);
      exit(0);
}

[hajma]

I'm seeing the same when running Solaris 11express inside Virtualbox OSE 4.0.4 on Fedora 15