I spent the past few days configuring a FreeBSD virtual server on top of a Windows 2003 host. The host is running on a 6-disk SATA RAID5 array, and the disk performance is rather good. The virtual server on the other hand seems to be struggling.
As an example, when downloading and extracting the ports collection for the first time, the virtual server took over 16 minutes to complete the operation. Just for fun, I took my old laptop out to see how long it would take on that... 6 minutes! The exact same operation, on a much slower hard drive. Not to mention a 1.7GHz P4 CPU vs dual 2.8GHz Xeons. Same story with memory.
Is this a VMWare problem, or FreeBSD problem? In the guest config I disabled memory page trimming and page sharing. Everything else should be normal. Any ideas?