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Poor guest performance, is this to be expected?

F

feistyfish

n00b
Joined
Oct 25, 2014
Messages
13
I'm using hyper-v client with windows 8.1

I've given a ubuntu 14.04 guest 4 cores and 4 gigs of RAM and have the vhd on a 2TB WD red drive that's directly attached. Any time i initiate large file transfers or am downloading a lot of data (3MB/s) my performance just tanks, applications are slow to launch, typing is laggy, even the mouse can be unresponsive

If i bring up task manager/resource monitor on the host it will show the disk is fully active, 99-100%and horrible read/write times like single MB read and 500KB write.

I suspect this is due to saturating the disks cache, but don't know for sure. I'm very new to all of this

is this abnormal behaviour? Or is this normal for a VM with these specs?
 
are you transferring from the 8.1 physical box to the Ubuntu VM on the same machine?
 
Host and guest share same physical drive?
If so, I'd say it's expected due to disk contention.

I tried it once..XP vm on Win 8 with a 7200RPM spinner with similar results.
Really needed SSD or separate mechanical drives for host/guest.
 
The VM has it's on mechanical drive, host is on its own SSD
Right now running a large torrent and downloading metadata on plex media server has the HDD showing 100% activity
 
Ok the content indexing/metadata download stopped, but the torrent is still going and the VM is running a lot smoother now (it's y'know usable). Also disk activity has gone back into the single digits.

I take it that's what low IOPS looks like?
 
One thing to keep in mind about Hyper-V is that your actual Windows 8.1 installation, when you activate Hyper-V, is essentially a prioritized virtual machine on top of the hyper-visor. That means that heavy I/O & CPU usage on the Win 8.1 desktop can severely starve the VMs of resources. I found this out while running BOINC on my 8.1 desktop and noticing that my VMs were basically useless.
 
i was fearing that would be the case. definitely a reason to think about moving to a real hyper v server in the future
 
MysticRyuujin said:
One thing to keep in mind about Hyper-V is that your actual Windows 8.1 installation, when you activate Hyper-V, is essentially a prioritized virtual machine on top of the hyper-visor. That means that heavy I/O & CPU usage on the Win 8.1 desktop can severely starve the VMs of resources. I found this out while running BOINC on my 8.1 desktop and noticing that my VMs were basically useless.
Click to expand...

He is correct. I run a Server 2008 R2 VM and SCO Unix VM on a desktop machine at work and don't have any issues. They are both on a 7200rpm drive and the host OS is on a SSD. Keep in mind the host OS is not used that hard so the resources are available for the guests. I would be curious to see the performance of the same/similar tasks on VirtualBox or VMware workstation/player.
 
I definitely recommend moving those torrents (and any other applications running on the host) into a separate VM. Then, the host can balance the 2 VMs properly.
 
Hyper-v is generally pretty slow for Linux distros. I think you'll be better off with Virtual Box. Also, in my own testing 12.04 is more reliable gui performance on 8.1, so it could be 14.04 on Hyper-v that is the issue. I'm unclear if you are using desktop or server.
 
Wow, I kinda forgot about this, whoops
im running 14.04 desktop because i like a GUI

To clarify the torrents are running on the ubuntu guest. I witness the slow performance when the guest is experiencing moderate load.
 
jimh425 said:
Hyper-v is generally pretty slow for Linux distros.
Click to expand...

false statement is false. Anyway, to OP, make sure you are running the integration services, first off. Also, try setting elevator=noop in your grub.conf.
 
Last edited:
i thought 14.04 was too new to have integration services for it...

I wish i understood the last part of your response
 
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