# FreeBSD on VMware slow



## Sylhouette (Nov 26, 2012)

Hello all.


I have installed FreeBSD on the vmware 5.1 hyperviser we have.
It is used for wordpress with 200 pages, so not big at all.
But it feels so slow! in comparising with the hardware it runs on now which is a P4!
It looks like the machine needs to wake up.
The loading of the first page take about 20 to 30 seconds, the pages after that goes a little faster.
When using the site for a while makes it behave like one would expect.
The hypervisor is a HP proliant ML 380 G8 with 64 GB and there is only one more windows 2008 server running on it.

The wordpress site is used for local documentation and is now running on a Pentium 4, but it is much faster than the vmware installed server.

Are there some settings i need to adjust for FreeBSD on VMware?


Thanks for your time
gr
Johan


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## mamalos (Nov 26, 2012)

Please provide the version of FreeBSD you are running.

As far as vmware is concerned, I had been administering FreeBSD 8.x servers on ESXI-4 that were performing excellently. Are you sure you are allocating your resources well on your vmware host? See if it uses swap, cause if so the performance degradation would be large.

I am far from a vmware expert, but I've faced very slow performance in one instance of vmware ESXI-4.1 running a single Windows 2008R2 guest on it, where the memory I allocated for my guest was close to that of the host (I assigned to it 7 out of 8 GB). When I was running a copy-paste command on some large files, the guest system was becoming extremely slow. From vmware's monitoring utilities I saw that the host OS had been using swap, even though the memory utilization on the guest OS was far lower than 7GB. When I allocated 6G on the guest, everything worked as expected.


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## Sylhouette (Nov 26, 2012)

I use FreeBSD 9.1 RC3

I did give it a little bit more memory now, from 4 to 7 GB
It now runs like it should.
I did not give it more than 4 GB before because it crashed when i set the memory higher than 4 GB

Well all is well now, thank you for your input.
I hope it stays out of swap.

gr
Johan


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