On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 8:59 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> What is virtio? > 10s of times faster than what? When I transfer a single large file > over ssh between boxen.math.washington.edu (my vmware server host) and > a guest image, the speed is 40MB/s on average. That's basically being > limited by the speed of the virtual disk.
What I meant is that virtio in KVM is 10s times faster than using regular network card emulation also in KVM. The latter (which is the default) means KVM in the host emulates a real network card, which the guest sees as a standard network card. Using virtio networking I get 14MB/s transfer using ssh between host and guest. If I don't use virtio, the transfer is less than 1MB/s (don't remember the exact number, but it was quite lame). I haven't tried vmware. It may be possible that vmware is faster than that even in my hardware. Your hardware is definitely nicer than mine, so the comparision is not fair (also, I think my hardware is somehow misconfigured, but that's a whole different issue). I don't know how to fairly benchmark the virtual disk drive (neither do I know how to benchmark a real hard drive). > I didn't need console access to setup vmware *server* on my server. I > just unpacked VMware-server-2.0.0-122956.x86_64.tar.gz, ran a script, > and stuff worked. VMware has: I tried that and something didn't work, I don't remember what. But I might try again. > * vmware player -- requires console > * vmware workstation -- requires console > * vmware server -- no console; uses a webapp and browser plugin to config I attempted to try vmware server. The player won't let me create virtual machines, and the workstation is not free beer. I didn't try very hard since I really wanted to give KVM a chance. > Note that I'm not trying to tell you to use closed source commercial > software (vmware); I'm just telling you what I use. Thanks for telling people not to use closed source math software :-) >> Do you think memory limits (or vm choice) may be behind the lock ups I >> get when I do symbolic calculations? Maybe the 300M of ulimit is too >> tight for running maxima/clisp? > > That's possible. 300MB is too tight. If I were to make some official > RAM recommendation for running Sage, it would be something like > "minimum RAM: 1GB". I will try with 3GB virtual memory for the guest, adding 3-6 GB of swap, and setting the ulimit for the notebook to 1GB. That may work better. I'll report back if things improve. Gonzalo --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
