Virtual PC 2004

blog
1

This won't be news to a lot of you, but I was playing around with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 today:

This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/07/virtual-pc-2004.html
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I don’t know about you, but I am getting much less performance than 10% cost with either vmWare or virtual pc. Btw, you can run FreeBSD in vmWare, it is right in the online help. Whoever, reviewed it didn’t read it very well.

3

On performance, it’s hard to say. The synthetic benchmarks show 10% difference on memory and CPU results. The disk and video results can be FAR slower, though, and I’m thinking that is where the difference comes from.

Here’s another link I found with some speed comments:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1054

4

you shouldn’t find to much of a difference if you have at least a Gig of ram.

5

Well, this was with 2gb of RAM, so I don’t think ram was an issue. VPC actually pages to system memory first, then to disk, so it’s safe to have VPC images with “only” 256mb RAM-- it’ll take more of the host system memory as necessary to page.

6

Here’s a more recent performance graph:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/vm.ars/4

As expected, disk is the big problem area. I’m surprised to see the memory bandwidth take such a beating in VPC 2004, too.