The performance study of a virtualized multicore web system

Enhancing the performance of computing systems has been an important topic since the invention of computers. The leading-edge technologies of multicore and virtualization dramatically influence the development of current IT systems. We study performance attributes of response time (RT), throughput, efficiency, and scalability of a virtualized Web system running on a multicore server. We build virtual machines (VMs) for a Web application, and use distributed stress tests to measure RTs and throughputs under varied combinations of virtual cores (VCs) and VM instances. Their gains, efficiencies and scalabilities are also computed and compared. Our experimental and analytic results indicate: 1) A system can perform and scale much better by adopting multiple single-VC VMs than by single multiple-VC VM. 2) The system capacity gain is proportional to the number of VM instances run, but not proportional to the number of VCs allocated in a VM. 3) A system with more VMs or VCs has higher physical CPU utilization, but lower vCPU utilization. 4) The maximum throughput gain is less than VM or VC gain. 5) Per-core computing efficiency does not correlate to the quality of VCs or VMs employed. The outcomes can provide valuable guidelines for selecting instance types provided by public Cloud providers and load balancing planning for Web systems.