VMware ESX, xperf, IntelPPM

One more case, this time a Windows 2008 R2 SP1 VM running in VMware ESX, analysed with xperf – part of Windows Performance Analysis tools.

Before

• Registry values:
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Processor\Start = 3
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm\Start = 3
• xperf -on latency
• [workload]
• xperf -d latency_before.etl
• xperf latency_before.etl

After

• Registry values:
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Processor\Start = 4
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm\Start = 4
• xperf -on latency
• [workload]
• xperf -d latency_after.etl
• xperf latency_after.etl

Conclusion

It seems that intelppm.dll is now off the radar, but hal.dll has increased in number of events, although half the number. The GeekBench scores have gone slightly up, but at the same time it’s a virtual machine. I can’t say there is a visible gain, remains to be tested further from application throughput point of view...

Update 28 March 2012

You may find that after the registry change that vmware-vmx.exe will exhibit constant high CPU consumption on the host system, in which case you might want to revert back to the default registry values.