bhyve Performance of windows 10 vm under virtualbox and bhyve

[drr]

I tried switching from virtualbox to bhyve (using vm-bhyve) for running a windows 10 vm and everything worked fine including audio input & output, good disk transfer and network speeds with virtio devices, etc. However, I could not manage to get the same performance that I get in virtualbox, specifically for some python scripts using excel workvbooks for data/calcualtions (the excel part comes from someone else, and I cannot get them to replace it with a better solution).

I noted the difference when each workbook took around 6-8 sec to process vs 4-5 sec in virtualbox (there are hundreds of workbooks and multiple iterations, so this makes a difference). I then ran some simple python loops and a cpu test tool to test the difference, and both took more time to run under bhyve than in virtualbox. Virtualbox vm's performace was almost at par with bare metal.

The vms guests and its software were identical; I could not figure out what is resulting in this difference. Are there bhyve options that I am missing?; I would really like to use bhyve instead of virtualbox if I can get the same performace. I am running FreeBSD 14.1 release with packages from the quarterly repos. My computer has a 10th gen i7, with 64GB ram.

 

[scottro]

Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I didn't do much, I needed a Windows VM to get into something at work, but the VirtualBox one was painfully slow. On Beehyve, it still wasn't great, but it was less painful. Note that in my case, it's a matter of opening an openvpn session, then firefox, and that's all I'm doing. I guess that isn't very helpful, but who knows, someone might come along looking for vbox vs bhyve, and find it slightly useful.