very poor performance for serving static files

[locojohn]

Hi!

There are many factors that can affect performance of the VM.  
Basically, the VM is like a black box -- you cannot really measure
performance and compare it to real hardware, as resources are
dynamically allocated as needed, and I/O is likely the weakest point of
the VM.

What is the physical number of CPUs in the virtual domain?  How much
physical RAM is allocated to VM guest?  What is the version of ESX
vCenter?

First, I would suggest to configure the number of guest OS VPUs (cores)
to be identical to the number of physical CPUs (cores) in the ESX
configuration.  Then I would allocate a decent amount of RAM to the VM. 


Make sure to use fairly new kernel (2.6.38+) for the guest OS.  

Also make sure that you use appropriate drivers for the hard disk
controller and network card eg PVSCSI and VMNET3 in the guest kernel
configuration.

See if any of the tweaks above bring any benefits and post your
results!

Andrejs

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,212555,212663#msg-212663