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Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:11:15 -0400
From: Steve Polyack <korvus@comcast.net>
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To: John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Steve Bertrand <steve@ibctech.ca>
Subject: Re: VMWare ESX and FBSD 7.2 AMD64 guest
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John Nielsen wrote:
> On Thursday 23 July 2009 19:44:15 Steve Bertrand wrote:
>   
>> I'd appreciate any feedback on tweaks that I can make (either to VMWare,
>> or FreeBSD itself) to make the virtualized environment much more efficient.
>>     
>
> See above about storage. Similar questions come up periodically; searching the 
> archives if you haven't already may prove fruitful. You may want to try 
> running with different kernel HZ settings for instance.
>   

You should certainly try setting both kern.hz and vfs.read_max in the 
FreeBSD VM.  I would recommend:

In loader.conf:
kern.hz=100

In /etc/sysctl.conf:
vfs.read_max=32

You may also try increasing vfs.hirunningspace.  I've had good results 
with setting it to 32MB on write-intensive systems.  Tuning vfs.read_max 
can give some boosts to physical-hardware FreeBSD systems as well.

-Steve Polyack