Painful Win 10 performance

Fri Feb 12 11:52:40 EST 2016

"their" being "my"

Agreed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jock Philip       [jock at visionchips.com] Vision Chips, Inc.
888.517.7779 x 3563
http://www.visionchips.com/

Developers of OBserver OB/GYN Ultrasound Reporting and Image Archiving System

-----Original Message-----
From: omnisdev-en [mailto:omnisdev-en-bounces at lists.omnis-dev.com] On Behalf Of Keith Bartlett
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2016 8:49 AM
To: OmnisDev List - English <omnisdev-en at lists.omnis-dev.com>
Subject: Re: Painful Win 10 performance

Hi Jock

If IP address makes that much difference it sounds like their DNS is not setup properly.

Cheers
Keith

> On 12 Feb 2016, at 16:06, Jock Philip <jock at visionchips.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Clifford,
> 
> Thanks for the response.  This is a client station so it's not running Oracle, just the instant client.  It turns out that something that made an immediate and very noticeable difference was to use the IP address rather than the server name.  It's perfectly usable now but I will also look at your suggestions and see if I can get it even better.
> 
> Jock
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Jock Philip       [jock at visionchips.com] Vision Chips, Inc.
> 888.517.7779 x 3563
> http://www.visionchips.com/
>  
> Developers of OBserver OB/GYN Ultrasound Reporting and Image Archiving 
> System
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: omnisdev-en [mailto:omnisdev-en-bounces at lists.omnis-dev.com] On 
> Behalf Of CLIFFORD ILKAY
> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 4:25 PM
> To: omnisdev-en at lists.omnis-dev.com
> Subject: Re: Painful Win 10 performance
> 
> On 11/02/16 04:50 PM, Jock Philip wrote:
>> Been doing all my dev work under Win 7 for a long time and everything 
>> has been fine.  I decided I should try working under Win 10 in 
>> preparation for customers migrating.  Some of the performance is 
>> truly painful.  Seems to be database related although I haven't done 
>> specific testing yet.  Here's the set up
>> 
>> Macbook Pro running VMWare Fusion 8.1 under El Capitan, 10.11.3
>> 
>> Oracle 11 XE database running on a Win 7 VM Win 10 64 bit VM with 
>> Studio 4.3 dev using Oracle instant client connection to the above XE 
>> database Plenty of memory all round 1TB solid state drive on the Mac
>> 
>> Any thoughts on what might be killing things?
> 
> Hi Jock,
> 
> If your hardware doesn't support Intel's VT-x, performance will be compromised. See this: <https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203296>.
> 
> How much RAM you allocate to the VM also makes a difference. Windows 10, particularly running Oracle, would perform pretty badly with anything less than 4GB of RAM and even that is a bare minimum. What is "plenty of memory"?
> 
> Using an SSD doesn't necessarily mean better performance. In some cases, especially with consumer grade SSDs, it could mean worse performance. 
> There are optimizations you can make for SSDs, though I don't know how that works when the machine isn't running on bare metal. See:
> 
> <http://www.disk-partition.com/windows-10/ssd-optimization-windows-10-
> 4348.html> 
> <http://www.extremetech.com/computing/206638-researchers-ssds-struggle
> -in-virtual-machines-thanks-to-garbage-collection>
> <http://www.mikeroysoft.com/windows-10-and-vmware-fusion/>
> 
> Make sure that Hyper-V isn't enabled in Windows 10. Nested virtualization isn't supported. I have no idea if it's even possible to start Hyper-V when running in a VM because the version of Windows 10 I'm running doesn't have it. Microsoft makes VirtualBox images available to developers for free but they're limited to 90 days. The solution, which Microsoft promotes by the way, is to create a snapshot of the VM after it has been configured and when the VM turns into a pumpkin in 90 days, to start over again with the snapshot. I've been scripting the provisioning of virtual machines so it's not a big deal for me to reset the VMs every 90 days.
> 
> On a related note, a client was having difficulty running the Debian VirtualBox image we distribute. It would hang on boot with nothing but a black screen and a blinking cursor on the virtual console. In a screen-sharing session, I noticed their VirtualBox machine manager could only create 32 bit machines. We distribute 64 bit images. We had to do two things to be able to run the 64 bit VM. First, we had to disable Hyper-V in the Windows host. VirtualBox and Hyper-V will not work at the same time. They both require exclusive access to the underlying hardware and because Hyper-V was configured to run on startup, VirtualBox could not get that exclusive access. Second, we had to enable the Intel VT-x extensions in the BIOS.
> 
> Having said all that, you have to determine where the bottleneck is. Is it networking? Is it CPU? Is it RAM? Is it I/O? If you have server hardware, throw that VM on it and see what happens.
> 
> The machine on which I'm typing this has an i5 CPU running at 2.5 GHz, 16GB of RAM and runs Fedora Linux. It was at the point where it was getting annoying to use due to CPU or RAM exhaustion on a regular basis. 
> I run Window 7 in a VirtualBox VM and usually have at least a couple 
> more Debian virtual machines running our software and another Debian 
> VM acting as a Debian package cache. (*)
> 
> I had a rack mount server lying about with dual Xeon CPUs and 72GB of RAM which I pressed into service running Windows Server 2012r2. I just migrated all the VirtualBox virtual machines to that server so this machine has a new lease on life now that it no longer has to host all those VMs. I can now allocate more resources to each VM and run more VMs simultaneously. Whereas before I could realistically only run one Windows VM locally, I now have Windows 7, 8.1, 10, and Server 2012r2 running on that server and it's not even breaking a sweat. I've associated an RDP session for each of those Windows instances with a virtual desktop in Fedora (I think it's called Spaces in OS X?) and it works marvellously.
> 
> The next step is to use the same tools I've been using 
> (<https://www.packer.io/>, <https://www.vagrantup.com/>,
> <http://saltstack.com/>) to create and configure VirtualBox images to create and configure Hyper-V images and run all those VMs within Hyper-V instead. I suspect performance will be even better. Real server hardware has optimizations for virtualization that desktop machines don't no matter how fast your CPU (**) or how much RAM you have.
> 
> (*) I'm building and destroying Debian virtual machines on a regular basis so every time I was doing that, I was downloading at least 200M of packages across the Internet. I spent a few hours putting up a package cache so that when I'm spinning up a new VM, it hits the cache first and only goes out to the Internet if it can't find it in the local cache.
> 
> (**) Apple charges a big premium for the fastest i7 CPUs on their iMacs and it's mostly a waste of money because to keep the fan noise down, they throttle the CPU aggressively to have it run cooler. It defeats the purpose of having a faster CPU if you can only use it at it's highest performance for short bursts. I'm guessing it's no different for their notebooks. If anything, the space constraints and thermal challenges in notebooks are even more severe.
> 
> --
> Regards,
> 
> Clifford Ilkay
> 
> + 1 647-778-8696
> 
> 
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Keith Bartlett
Adnet Ltd - (0)1491 642133
www.adnetltd.co.uk

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