[CentOS-virt] performance differences between kvm/xen

[Karanbir Singh]

On 10/20/2010 12:35 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> Being skeptical is the best approach in the absence of
> verifiable/falsifiable data. Today or tomorrow I'll get my hands on a new
> host system and although it is supposed to go into production immediately I
> will probably find some time to do some rudimentary benchmarking in that
> regard to see if this is worth investigating further. Right now I'm

That sounds great. I've got a machine coming online in the next few days 
as well and will do some testing on there. Its got 2 of these :

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5310

So not the newest/greatest, but should be fairly representative.

> planning to use fio for block device measurements but don't know any decent
> (and uncomplicated) network i/o benchmarking tools. Any ideas what tools I
> could use to quickly get some useful data on this from the machine?

iozone and openssl speed tests are always a good thing to run as a 'warm 
up' to your app level testing. Since pgtest has been posted here 
already, I'd say that is definitely one thing to include so it creates a 
level of common-code-testing and comparison. mysql-bench is worth 
hitting as well. I have a personal interest in web app delivery, so a 
apache-bench hosted from an external machine hitting domU's / VM's ( but 
more than 1 instance, and hitting more than 1 VM / domU at the same time 
) would be good to have as well.

And yes, publish lots of machine details and also details on the code / 
platform / versions used. I will try to do the same ( but will  limit my 
testing to whats already available in the distro )

thanks

- KB