FreeNAS 11.2 Win 10 VM slow performance and near 100% CPU usage

Yorick

Wizard
Joined
Nov 4, 2018
Messages
1,912
will we be able to upgrade without redoing preexisting jails and VMs

Yes. In my testing, upgrade from 11.3 was smooth, all jails and VMs came over.

You may want to iocage upgrade -R 12.1-RELEASE jailname once you know you are going to stay on 12.0.
 

zizzithefox

Dabbler
Joined
Dec 18, 2017
Messages
41
In the mean
That's what I've discovered as well, TrueNas 12 windows vm performance was much better, it was usable, I wonder when stable version is out, will we be able to upgrade without redoing preexisting jails and VMs?

I tried that too, and it is better, although I have not tried using virtio for block devices. So maybe after 12 update 1 o update 2 I will switch because I'm really looking for that. It would be nice to have the nvme emulation that freebsd 12 supposedly gets, tough.

On the other hand, I noticed that power management also messes up with performance even in linux/freebsd virtual machines.
It's always been annoying that bhyve actually prevents the processor to ever scale frequency down, so I always put a limitation in cpu freq via powerd_flags in rc.conf tunable if I don't actually need the full power of the cpu. It costs a lot more to run it at 3300mhz vs 2200mhz. Just by chance, I happened to stop powerd and set the frequency via sysctl because I needed more juice for a test, and I noticed it also works marginally better in 11.3 if you just tell powerd to use a fixed frequency.
 

Yorick

Wizard
Joined
Nov 4, 2018
Messages
1,912
For what it's worth, these are performance results from a Win10 VM on TrueNAS Core Beta 2, with virtio for storage and network. Network test was done Win10 to Win10, both wired. Not sure what's going on with UDP, I'd need to test some more, could be on the machine that's used as a "server" for the test. Maybe don't run videoconferencing in the VM. TCP throughput is at GigE speed, no complaints there.

All in all it looks quite useable, and the subjective experience via RDP matches this: A little slow on actions that need to access disk, but not unusably so.

Win10-VM-CrystalDiskMark.png Win10-VM-IPv4-Throughput.png Win10-VM-IPv6-Throughput.png
 

bal0an

Explorer
Joined
Mar 2, 2012
Messages
72
An upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0-U1 resolves my issues. With the same guest, single core read and mixed memory access is nominal compared to 11.3, UI responsiveness and performance improve to a point where the Windows 10 guest can be used without lag. I've subsequently upgraded from 2003 to 20H2 which took only a few minutes. Under freenas 11.3 disk activity would take ages, and the UI would be unresponsive, both is back to normal now.

12.0-U1 userbench performance
Windows 10 1909 on FreeNAS 12.0-U1.png

11.3-U2 userbench performance
Windows 10 1909 on FreeNAS 11.3-U2.png
 
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