The folks at 37Signals posted last week about how their very cool product Basecamp, which by the way we use for our book project, has more vroom.  They claim that they have “…cut response times to about 1/3 of their previous levels even when handling over 20% more requests per minute.”  How did they do this you ask?  They were running their own private compute cloud with virtualized instances using Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM). As they state, “To make a long story a little less long, we saw some pretty extreme performance improvements from moving Basecamp out of a virtualized environment and back onto dedicated hardware.”

The posting by Zach at 37Signals didn’t imply that they were surprised by the improvement and my point is that no one should be. As we’ve stated in The Cloud Isn’t For Everyone and several other posts, virtualization is not free nor is it magical. It requires CPU cycles and memory. There are definitely advantages to running a private cloud but improved performance over dedicated hardware is not one of them. As in the comments to Zach’s post, I know all the virtualization fans are screaming that they should have tried VMWare ESXi or Xen instead of KVM but as MI states in the comments “I didn’t mean to imply it, but I will I say it straight out: Dedicated is faster than virtualization.” And no one should be surprised by that.