Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1468 mails)

[Sandy Drobic <opensuse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> In <4A2547B0.8020706@xxxxxxxxx>, Sandy Drobic wrote:
> > Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> > > On 2009-06-02T22:07:17, Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > As far as I know if the hard disk of the guest os is an image file on
> > > > the host OS, the host OS treats it as a file and offer to cache it in
> > > > the main memory. However if vmplayer access a partition or harddisk it
> > > > is not cached by the host OS's file system. That might make it even
> > > > slower. Unless of course the database is in particular on a raw device
> > > > that is directly accessed from the guest OS, as Sandy pointed out.
> > > The caching doesn't make a difference, as it is not really different.
> > The question itself is not relevant. Fact is that performance will
> > increase a lot if you use a raw device.
>
> Well, then that software is written poorly.  For example, the kernel can use 

Agreed! We even opened a call by VMWare to debug the problem but they weren't
very interested, so we had to use what we got, a bit frustrated and one
illusion poorer.

> a file or a partition/disk for swap.  Both are virtually the same speed.  
> There's few reasons accessing physical storage through a file would be any 
> slower that accessing it through a block device.  (The most noticable would 
> be severe fragmentation, but modern filesystems don't suffer from that 
> often.)

True, previously swap was recommended to be installed on its own partition,
now it doesn't make much difference. Unfortunately, it seems as if priorities
are a bit different as far as VMWare is concerned. This goes for the
enterprise version (VMWare Infrastructure) as well as for the cheap versions.
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