Performance of Virtual Machine

I gave up dual boot when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 and moved Windows into virtual machine. The performance of Windows guest was good, 35 seconds from power on to desktop (very good as my HDD is 5400 rpm), until I began using it seriously.

I've done a benchmark of compiling one of my GWT project in Eclipse four times. I still remember Turbo C can compile 10 lines of code per second, while Turbo Pascal can compile 100 lines per second when I was in university. Compilation is quite suitable for benchmark because it involves both CPU and I/O tasks.

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th
native in Ubuntu	82	81	80	79
in VirtualBox	143	195	196	265
in Vmware Player	112	107	108	108

The Windows I'm using in virtual machines is Windows 7 Professional 32-bit. IDE is Eclipse for Java EE 3.6.2 32-bit for Linux and Windows. Virtual machine software are Oracle VirtualBox 4.0.8 and VMware Player 3.1.4, for Linux of course.

This is by no means a scientific benchmark, but what I got is if you plan to use a Windows guest heavily in a Linux host, VMware Player is the one to go with at the moment.

gvfs-bin is not included in Ubuntu 11.04 by default

I developed a backup software running on Ubuntu at home. To get maximum transfer performance when copying files to remote machine, I use some VFS system commands like gvfs-rm, gvfs-copy and gvfs-mkdir. It's much faster than operating files and folders in ~/.gvfs, which, in my case, can get only up to 500kB/s.

However the first time I used it after I upgraded to Natty Narwhal was a nightmare, I took for granted that those gvfs commands are ready to use but I was wrong.

 sudo apt-get install gvfs-bin  

Murphy's law applies everywhere.