A VM is a VM, and no matter what OS runs in the VM there's some hardware emulation involved. Jails aren't VMs, though, and I would (all other things being equal) expect better performance from a jail than from a VM--not only do you not have the hardware emulation layer, you also don't have the resource limits of the VM. But the Linux jail template was deprecated years ago.
If you're going to create a VM, you can do so under 9.10 using iohyve/bhyve. Don't use a VirtualBox jail for anything you're going to need for any significant period of time, as it won't work if you upgrade to 9.10.2 or later.