I wonder what experience others have of running openbsd on top of vmware infrastructure.
I have a pretty regular Lighttpd+Mysql+PHP5 setup of 2 vmware guests:
-Debian7 Wheezy
-OpenBSD 5.2 (this version was choosen because some higher versions didnt even boot with kernel panic)
None of the installs have any tuning done in their guest kernels, sysctl values or lighty/mysql configs. Also I do not use memcached. Both resides on the same hardware, same disk.
What I noticed is that webpages on the obsd server are very slow. CPU usage is mostly consumed by php, would this generally mean the virtualizing openbsd does not worth it?
Anybody knows the reason behind why is it slower than the linux webserver? I know that when it comes to hardware support linux is always better than bsds, but vmware emulates some ancient hardware what's recognized by most of the systems anyway. When it comes to BSDs they are better in what they were made to do (network operations).
Best Answer
With all due respect to my fellow netizens here, I don't think your question was thoroughly read by others who answered. The general assumption is to slam OpenBSD with assumptions that don't pan out in actual use conditions, when really your main piece of information was that PHP was chewing up the CPU the most. There are multiple questions that should have been asked:
since this situation can easily be a performance-inefficient php.ini or httpd.conf configuration, are you definitely using the same version of PHP on both platforms?
Which Apache were you using on each system (obsd by default in 5.2 uses it's own 1.3 security-enhanced version, but Debian would default to Apache 2.0, making your results very skewed).
What is your configuration of the vm's themselves in VMWare (drives, nics, etc.)?
One reason to point to the bias in the other answers is: