Measuring the Impacts of Virtualization on the Performance of Thread-Based Applications

The rapid advancements in computer hardware and software facilitated the ability for conventional users and developers to use various virtualization techniques on their common personal computers. For example, users and developers are often using virtualization technologies such as VirtualBox, VMware, Docker, and WSL. These technologies enabled the ability to develop, test, and deploy software across various platforms and computing environments, each of which ensures isolation and security, but may often sacrifice performance due to the extra layer of communication. Thus, this paper presents a performance-based evaluation for thread-based applications that are hosted on different virtualization frameworks. Therefore, it evaluates the effects of virtualization techniques on sequential and multithreaded applications. The performance of the same application is measured on different environments, some of which are provided by a virtual machine that is powered by VirtualBox, while the others are contained in a lightweight virtualization that is provided by the WSL. This paper uses the same application on all environments and presents a performance wise comparison.