virtualbox I/O 3 times slower than KVM?

[Bernhard Fröhlich]

On So.,   1. Mai. 2011 04:28:26 CEST, typo W <aqqa11 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Hi, I'm brand new to virtualbox, so pardon me in case I made stupid
> mistakes.   I created a FreeBSD guest out of the regular virtualbox port
> (3.2.12) on FreeBSD 8.2, then timed the copying of a 320MB binary file
> to another file, which took 4 seconds, ie, 80MB/s.   On an identical
> hardware I created a CentOS guest out of KVM running on CentOS, and the
> same operation only takes 1 second.   On both hosts, the copy takes 1
> second.   That is, virtualbox slowed the copying to 1/4 speed on my guest
> FreeBSD.
> 
> Both hosts are Dell R710, with 6 x 600GB 15K SAS drives forming a RAID6
> with R700 controller with 512MB cache.
> 
> I'm testing in preparation of production servers, so would prefer
> regular ports, ie, 4.0.6 tar ball is out of question for now.

Virtualbox 4.0 uses async i/o so that will probably improve performance. Please also use the new ahci kernel module in the guest because that also significantly improves i/o performance.

Virtualbox 4.0.6 will be committed to the tree next week.