Lately I’ve found out that I can speed up my Fedora 19 testing if I increase the number of CPUs assigned to the VM. This is a short blogpost about it, maybe it will help also others.
By default, this is what a default new VM in virt-manager looks like:
There is just a single CPU assigned, out of my 4 host CPUs available (Intel Core i7 processor).
In my completely unscientific benchmark, I tried changing the value and measuring how the boot time of Fedora 19 Alpha Live changes. It was measured from isolinux screen to displaying the Fedora welcome dialog. Of course I used a few warm-up starts first to make sure everything is cached and the results are not affected by the disk access. These are the results:
Fedora 19 Alpha Live boot time
| Number of CPUs | Boot time (seconds) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 67 |
| 2 | 48 |
| 3 | 46 |
| 4 | 46 |
It seems that the boot process of a Live image can be well parallelized. There is a large difference between a single CPU and a dual CPU. Adding more than two CPUs doesn’t help considerably. Quite interestingly, when I tried to measure an installed system, the changes were very small:
Fedora 19 installed boot time
| Number of CPUs | Boot time (seconds) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 29 |
| 2 | 27 |
| 3 | 25 |
| 4 | 27 |
The live image performs a lot of one-shot setup tasks during boot, that’s probably the major difference here.
I didn’t perform any further benchmarks inside the running system, for example Anaconda installation. It might be interesting to compare the installation speed with different number of processors, but I haven’t gotten to it yet (patches welcome:)). But because I boot Live images very often, at least I know that the boot process is significantly improved by using two CPUs in the VM. In my 4 CPU host system that seems as a good number. It doesn’t hog my host down too much, and if I really need it, I can run two VMs in parallel and they will fully utilize my processor potential, at the expense of my host system becoming a bit lagging.
As a side note, as I’ve found out, the default VM memory is 1024 MB. That is quite insufficient, your installation will suffer by a lot of swapping and it will take much longer. For pre-release images with debugging options enabled it might not even succeed. Usually I use 1.5 GB RAM for generic Fedora testing, and 2 GB RAM for pre-Beta testing (which includes debug kernel). With these amounts of memory I find the installation go pretty well. Of course you must have sufficient amount of memory available in your host system.
Also, don’t miss out on my previous blogpost about the speed of different disk bus drivers.
Happy testing!
Kparal's Fedora Blog 