What are the alternatives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- runinng the DB-server VM on the Cloud (requires access to the cloud resources over the internet)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- running the DB-server on separate hardware (requires access to separate hardware. So you need to carry the hardware with you or provide remote access to it, e.g. over VPN)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Another potential alternative would be the emulation of x86-64 on ARM. I.e. on Mac that means running QEMU. The product UTM makes that easy as it adds a GUI on top of QEMU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According lots of feedback on the internet the emulation is VERY SLOW<\/strong>. I thought I’ll check that myself on what “very slow” means in terms of running an Oracle database in an emulated environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s the environment I’m in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- MacBook Air (M1, 2020), 8GB RAM<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- UTM version 3.2.4. from Turing Software LLC (can be downloaded from the App Store) and costs $10<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
For testing purposes I created 2 VMs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- Ubuntu Linux with Oracle XE on Docker<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/UTM-Docker.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n- \n
- Oracle Linux 8.x with Oracle EE 19.16.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/UTM-2-1024x752.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/UTM-3-1024x386.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nFirst of all the good news is that I could install and run the 2 environments without any crash. Everything runs very stable as long as the UTM System setting “Force Multicore” is not enabled. In that case UTM can only use 1 core of the Mac. That’s very stable. With “Force Multicore” enabled more than 1 Core can be used from the Mac on the VM. In my case that was fast, but running Java in the VM did not work anymore. I had to disable cores then to make Java work (see the summary below on how I did that).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now to the main question: What is the performance of the DB-server running in the emulated UTM-VM?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It takes considerable more time to install the environment and it of course feels much slower than running a type 2 hypervisor (like Virtualbox on native x86_64). But I wanted to know exact numbers, so I did a couple of tests:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.) Running datapatch against a CDB with 1 PDB (part of dbca after installing 19.16. software only):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This test was performed with “Force Multicore” disabled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1 Core for the VM on the emulated environment:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- Patch CDB: 2h, 37min, 23sec<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Patch PDB$SEED and PDB1: 1h, 41min, 30sec<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
I did run the same on a virtualbox on a MacBook Pro with a 2.6 GHZ Core i7:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2 Cores for VM on type 2 hypervisor on native x86_64:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- Patch CDB: 8min, 15sec<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Patch PDB$SEED and PDB1: 5min, 32sec<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Result: Emulated VM with half the cores is approx factor 18 slower than on the native machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
REMARK: All tests performed for this Blog were done on those 2 machines (MacBook Air 2020 M1 with emulated UTM-VM versus MacBook Pro 2019 Intel with Virtualbox).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2.) A pure DB-CPU-Load test<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To utilize a DB sever on CPU I usually run the following cpu_load.sql-script in sqlplus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
set lines 120\nset timing on time on\nwith t as ( select rownum from dual connect by level <= 60)\nselect \/*+ ALL_ROWS *\/ count(*) from t,t,t,t,t\n\/<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nI.e. the dedicated server process runs 100% on CPU for a couple of secs. This is a single thread performance test and is not related to the number of active cores as the test runs on 1 core only. The results were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
UTM (emulated): 3min, 33sec
Virtualbox (native): 15.5 secs<\/p>\n\n\n\n–> The emulated VM is 13.75 times slower<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3.) CPUSPEED in the Oracle system statistics<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The CPUSPEED of system stats in aux_stats$ shows 342 for that emulated machine (342 millions of instructions per second). I gathered system statistics while running a swingbench test:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/system-stats-charbench-1024x485.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe performance cores of the M1 run between 600 – 3204 MHz. I.e. the emulated environment is approximately 3204\/342 = 9.4 times slower from an Oracle perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4.) Swingbench<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Loaded Swingbench data with the oewizard by leaving everything on default except the load factor and the parallelism. I took a load factor 0.7 and a parallelism of 2. The total runtime for the load was 17min, 52secs and it inserted 14’569 rows \/sec:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/oewizard-utm-812x1024.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nDoing the same against Virtualbox on a native Intel environment looked as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/oewizard-load-time-Intel.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nI.e. 14569 rows inserted per second on the emulated environment compared to 75966 rows per second on Virtualbox (factor 5.2). But as I just ran with a parallelism of 2, I probably haven’t used the available resources effectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- Oracle Linux 8.x with Oracle EE 19.16.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
- Ubuntu Linux with Oracle XE on Docker<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/charbench-1min-force-multi-UTM-1024x362.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/swingbench-1min-Intel-770tps-1024x331.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/force-multicore-2-1024x754.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n