Performance analysis of interactive desktop applications in virtual machine environment

Abstract

To assess the feasibility of hosting interactive desktop applications in virtual machine environment, this paper measures and analyzes the interactive performance of the desktop operating system in Xen environment. The experimental results show that short-latency input events are not sensitive to the virtualization overhead but the average response latencies of long-latency events in Xen system are remarkably longer than the latencies in the unvirtualized system. In fact, the larger variance of response latency, instead of the longer latency itself, is the most important performance problem for the virtualized approach. Our analysis shows that the main reason of the poor performance is the insufficient CPU share of the driver-specific virtual machine, which causes the long freezing periods of other guest virtual machines. While the offline adjustment can alleviate the problem, an online adaptive adjustment of the CPU allocation is necessary for the practical use of Xen hosted desktop systems.