Memory benchmark - Database Operations in virtualized operating system

[Kensey]

Hello,

I have a question. Im doing some tests in order to compare performance of virtualization and when Im doing Memory test on non virtualized PC I have result about 2000 points. Next I do the same test on the same PC but virtualized (vmware, virtualbox) and I have result about 1000 points. The reason of that is "Database Operations". For example on non virtualized PC I have value 79 and on the virtualized - 12. Can You tell me why is that ? What does it mean? Is this test reliable ?

Regards
Kensey

[David (PassMark)]

It would be good to get the full set of memory results and the system specifications. Plus details of the VM (number of cores & amount of RAM allocated).

A result of 12 is very low. If this score is repeatable, there is something wrong with the setup of the VM.

[Kensey]

Computer spec is:

Motherboard Asus P8P67 Pro
Core i5-2500 3,30 GHz
8 GB RAM 2x Kingston KHX2133C11D3/4GX
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970

Result are simillar on the VMware ESix and Oracle Virtualbox

[David (PassMark)]

In V9, the database test benchmarks the speed of a number of common operations on data storage structures. These include a Queuing, List operations & Set operations (binary tree index). See this page on STL for background on these data structures. About 300MB of RAM is required for the test. The test is largely single threaded.

These are all super common operations, used in nearly every piece of real world software. While there is some VM overhead, there shouldn't be a huge difference between a physical machine and a virtual machine for this test, if the VM doesn't run out of RAM.

In our tests that we did today we saw the Database Operations score being,
88 on a 64bit Win10 physical machine, i7-3770 CPU
73 on a Win7 32bit guest VM in VirtualBox (Version 5.1) running on the same physical machine
62 on a Win10 64bit guest VM in VirtualBox (Version 5.1) running on the same physical machine

Update:
With the release of PerformanceTest V10 in March 2020 the Database operations test was changed.
In V10 It was changed to use an in memory sqlite3 database based on SQLite 3.31.1. Will run for maximum available physical cores and use at least 128MB RAM per thread. Support for processor groups and thread affinity was also added.

Then in V10.0, build 1007 (July 2020), we limited max amount of test threads to 32 for this test due to timeouts when using huge numbers of CPU cores. Memory bandwidth doesn't increase with more cores. So in most cases this doesn't impact the result too much, even on machines with >32 cores.