[Vm-dev] Making a Slower VM

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Sun Feb 9 18:07:47 UTC 2014


On Sat, Feb 08, 2014 at 08:37:46PM -0800, Sean P. DeNigris wrote:
>  
> We often talk about making the VM faster. How about making it slower?

We do not usually get too many requests to make the VM slower, what a
refreshing change of perspective ;-)

http://www.ispot.tv/ad/Y94D/xfinity-internet-traffic-featuring-bill-and-karolyn-slowsky

Joking aside, there actually is one legitimate reason for wanting a slow VM.
With high performance VMs and with ever faster hardware, it is very easy to
implement sloppy things in the image that go unnoticed until someone runs the
image on an old machine or on limited hardware. It is sometimes useful to
test on old hardware or on a slow VM to check for this.

I think someone mentioned it earlier, but a very easy way to produce an
intentionally slow VM is to generate the sources from VMMaker with the
inlining step disabled. The slang inliner is extremely effective, and turning
it off produces impressively sluggish results.

Dave



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