Parallels performance tests

I spent part of my day evaluating performance for Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit under Parallels on Mac OSX Snow Leopard.

Disheartening is the way I would put it. Thinks work well for the most part, but in other ways it falls short.

I really was expecting better results than a 50% performance hit compiling with VS 2010 Professional. Clean, Rebuild of 27 projects as Win32 Debug in the solution, roughly 400,000 lines of C++ code = 4 minutes 18 seconds on average. Under Windows 7 native that time was cut to an average of 1 minute 50 seconds. No concurrent builds allowed.

The virtual machine running off the bootcamp partition is allocated 6 processors and 8GB of memory. The native machine has 12 cores with 24 hardware threads (Parallels doesn't seem to provide hardware threads to VM as I allocate 6 cores and 6 procs show up in the Task Manager [you would think 12 would.]) This is why I expected a performance drop, but not a more than 100% improvement under the native OS.

Anyhow, still very impressive software, and it is nice to have OSX and Win 7 running side by side. I'm probably doing something wrong anyhow (historical precedent would suggest...)