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The problem with running on virtual hardware…
time to read 1 min | 82 words
I tested this in both GoGrid & EC2, and got similar results:
The disk I/O is really bad. Just to give you an idea about the difference, here is the same process on my local machine (1TB 7,200 RPM WD HD):
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Wow. According to my mac (well, the network monitor on it) I can copy to/from my Mac Mini (from my Macbook) at about 30 MB/sec, over gigabit ethernet. No special drive - I think it's a 5400 on both ends.
Is it a windows thing? Or some vista setup problem? I thought ScottHa talked about it a while back... and ended up with 20MB/sec or more.
Nic, look at the number of items being copied - 7448. Lots of small files always incurs a penalty hit.
Expanding on @Nic's comment... 30MB/s is likely the sustained sequential write speed of the destination drive. The reason that Oren is getting 2.26MB/s is that he is writing lots of little files. Random write performance is a lot lower than sequential. It is not a Windows issue, but a hardware limitation. The low random write performance in a VM is interesting. Virtualized disk I/O performs worse than virtualized CPU and is often the limiting factor when determining whether a particular workload should be virtualized or hosted on physical hardware. For example, web servers (running apps) virtualize better than file servers.
Just like the 1000 other dumb technologies we have seen come and go, Cloud is dead. Long live local IO.
With respect to backing up, rotate a spare HD at your safe deposit box or run Carbonite on an unused computer because it will take that loooong to copy your data offsite.
At least use robocopy or TeraCopy when copying many files over network, they support retry on network failures.
zvolkov,
Look at what I am actually _doing_, I am unzipping a file, not doing network ops.
I just setup a virtual server on the weekend, and unzipped 400mb file of 20k files in under a minute...
Maybe your sharing resources with other people on what ever virtual environment your on.
Oh!
Also note that ayende is copying (unzipping) files on the same drive, that would obviously work slower than copying from a different drive.
Same as when I copy two large files from E: to C: at the same time I get about 25% speed on each.
Ayende: With EC2 you will find the local drives suck.
If you attach an EBS Volume, you'll get significantly better IO. (And the data on that won't go away if the machine is turned off)
It'd be worth asking GoGrid what their disks are attached using - I'd hazard a guess that it's iSCSI over 1-10GbE to a SAN box.
I know our VM farm at our 'litt'e dev shop has no issues with disk IO, even when we've got 40 VMs up over two VM servers.
you can solve this problem by clicking "Fewer details"
Um, you do realize that my issue is the performance, not the dialog, right?
yes, bad joke
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