Benchmarks Virtual versus Bootcamp

Discussion in 'Windows Virtual Machine' started by tn_ken, Aug 30, 2007.

  1. tn_ken

    tn_ken Bit poster

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    Thread was moved from "General Discussions > Website and Forum Discussions" to "Parallels Desktop for Mac > Windows Guest OS Discussion".
    Stacey M


    I spent today doing some fun work with Parallels using both virtual machine and bootcamp virtual machine and found some interesting things.

    IN the best of all worlds where there is adequate memory (3gb or more), Parallels virtual machine is as fast as bootcamp running without parallels at all (booted directly to windows).

    With 2gb of RAM or less, bootcamp booted directly is the best followed by Bootcamp under Parallels followed by the virtual machine.

    All of this testing was done on a brand new iMac (lowest end current model which is a dream machine) with 1gb and then 3gb of RAM with Windows set as the priority and allocating 1/2 of the machine's memory to Windows. In reality, Parallels shows only 256MB of real memory use during this time but there must be something else going on that I'm not able to see.

    I then applied what I had learned to my MacBook Pro (3gb) and am astonished how well it runs as a virtual machine. Bringing up Excel is instantaneous in the virtual machine - actually FASTER than when booted directly into Windows and that seems to make sense to me as the copy of Excel is totally in memory after the first access. The other beauty of the virtual machine is that one can "suspend" it and bring it back in less than a minute and all of the cacheing is still in place.

    I was going to look at VMWare until these tests and there's simply no way that it could be any better. My MacBook Pro is the fastest Windows machine I've ever experienced and I'm just delighted with it. Memory is the key here - the more the merrier - and it's so cheap these days that there's simply no sense in not maxing out a machine.

    My MacBook Pro is one of the earlier ones limited to 3gb so now I'm wondering - what would another gb get me????? <grin>
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 14, 2007
  2. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    Interesting. Any benchmark figures? Say, encoding times, etc. Actual open times. FPS at different graphical tests. All these hard numbers to back things up would be great to add to this.
     
  3. tn_ken

    tn_ken Bit poster

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    Yeah - I thought of doing some hard numbers but the impact is SO clear and apparent to the eye that it's just a no brainer.

    For example, once Excel has been loaded once (cached) under all of the scenarios, Parallels Virtual Machine with 3gb of RAM loads it so fast that it's hard to tell any time between the click and the appearance on the screen. Running Bootcamp Virtual there's a noticeable delay (1-2 seconds). With less and less RAM the Virtual Machine falls farther and farther behind with 1gb loading it (even cached) in about 10 seconds but with virtual Bootcamp still being 1-2 seconds.

    Interesting huh?

    In any case, memory is cheap and that's the way I've headed. Having Windows as a Virtual machine also makes the issues of backup SO easy because there's not a second partition to worry about.
     
  4. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    It is interesting for sure. I might be building a wiki with others for the different versions (what features when, etc.) and hosting that, do you want to help me build a benchmark section to it?
     
  5. tn_ken

    tn_ken Bit poster

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    I'm not sure what you had in mind exactly or how much work that would be. I seem to be constantly behind on projects!!

    The other issue is that the reason that I was able to do this was the availability of a new iMac that I was configuring for a client of mine and it's going to be leaving at the end of next week. I was able to test it and reset it without worrying about live data.

    I will say this. Setting up a bootcamp partition and getting rid of it is much easier than I had imagined. Setting up Windows on it is still quite time-consuming as I've not yet discovered how to move a virtual machine to a bootcamp partition. The transporter does a great job in the other direction though.

    So - tell me what you have in mind and what your time frame is and I'll consider it.

    I have two MacBook Pros here - both the same configuration so they have 3gb of Ram (the max for this model) and can be run with 1, 2 or 3gb pretty easily.
     
  6. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    I was thinking of doing some common tasks with a stopwatch, start-up, shut-down, file transfers, benchmark tests, etc.

    I have a MBP, and I should have my hands on an XServe that can go down for a while (if I do end up buying another one, it'll have several drives, plenty of memory and such). Then we could just run actual hard numbers between the two. I should be getting xSAN so I should be able to RAID up the drives in a 0, then switch it to a 1 configuration, as well as configuring on BootDisk versus non-bootdisk, etc.

    I think it might be interesting to people to have these different stats available. I can create a VM image that we could all use for benchmarking. It could take a month if need be, it doesn't have to be finished overnight.

    Any other takers?
     
  7. daj

    daj Member

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    i would be happy to help out any way I can

    I have a MBP with 2Gb ram -- A bootcamp partion with XP, and a virtual image with XP too


    I can also install Vista if required.
     
  8. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    I'll try and get something up to enter the results in today... I'll post a link when it is up.
     
  9. Hugh Watkins

    Hugh Watkins Forum Maven

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    you used to be be able to download a well structured standard set of tests

    Hugh W
     
  10. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    1,954
  11. daj

    daj Member

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  12. Eru Ithildur

    Eru Ithildur Forum Maven

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    Hey hey, thanks. I'll try and get some benchmarks of my own done.
     

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