Glonoinha's Journal: VMware hosts : XP Pro faster than 2000 Pro

Well those of you following this thread know that I am playing with Linux in VMware, running on a MS host. I recently put XP Pro on a P4 2.4GHz HT box and installed VMware on it, was able to make a two-box shootout between that machine and my reigning champion (the P4 2.4GHz nonHT box running 2000 Pro.)

For the record I already did this with 2000 Pro running on the HT box and the non-HT machine was faster by a touch (I'm guessing 5% off the cuff.)

Under XP Pro, the HT box is faster than the non-HT box running 2000 Pro by about the same difference. Start the vmLinux sessions at the same time, the one running in a VM on the XP host gets to the login prompt about 5-10 seconds faster, start Gnome and it is done about 4-6 seconds faster.

I attribute this to XP's handling the hyperthreaded CPU better than Pro did, but it might have something to do with the XP box being a totally fresh install and a recently defragged hard drive. 3% or so isn't statistically significant, unless they are running side by side I can't tell the difference ... but it is (a little) faster.

I haven't tried disabling HT on the XP box, expect updates here if I do. Note - I am also considering running two instances of the same VM from different directories to see if the HT has any effect on performance when multiples are running.

For what it is worth :
XP box stats : P4 2.4GHz HT, 1.25G pc3200 RAM, and a fast Hitachi drive.
Win2000 Pro box stats : P4 2.4GHz non-HT, 640M ECC/Registered pc2100 RAM, fast Western Digital hard dive.