Vincent Poy writes:
> Speaking about vmware, how much of the performance is a vm
> supposed to give compared to the actual processor in a stand-alone
> machine?
It depends on what metric one uses to measure performance. Boots
(loading kernel) with a graphics console are painfully slow, like
5-10% of native speed. CPU bound programs run at near-native speeds.
I/O bound jobs are much slower.
Memory is a very important factor -- 128MB or less is too little to
run VMware at a reasonable speed. And to conserve memory, it really
helps to use a "plain" disk rather than using a disk file. This
entails vmware doing I/O to a raw disk partition rather than to a file
and reduces memory use by eliminating double caching of data by the
host and guest OSes.
FWIW, my old 300MHz PII (128MB ram, disk file) was nearly unusable.
My wife's 400MHz laptop (192MB ram, plain disk) is fairly decent. My
new 1.2GHz Tbird (1GB ram, plain disk) feels quite fast. This is for
my workload, which is typically an occasional boot into Windows.
Drew
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