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I created a virtual machine on my desktop to run our continuous integration process. After I was happy with it, I moved the VM (keeping the same configuration) onto our server where I found that the headless cucumber tests were taking 2-3x longer. This server's only purpose currently is hosting VMs and the results persisted after a reboot and running only the CI VM.

I'm struggling in trying to determine what could be causing this slowdown or how to go about diagnosing the problem. Any help would be appreciated.

The VM
Ubuntu 14.04 server
Hypervisor: kvm
Architecture: x86_64
Allocated 2 CPUs
Allocated 4096 MB memory

My Desktop
Ubuntu 12.04.4 desktop
Motherboard: ASUS Z87-PLUS
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770S CPU @ 3.10GHz
RAM: 4 x 8GB DDR3 1333 MHz
HDD: 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s

The Server
Ubuntu 13.04 server
Motherboard: ASUS Z9PE-D16 Series
CPU: 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620
RAM: 4 x 16GB DDR3 1333 MHz
HDD: 3 x 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s

EDIT - Cucumber Info
xvfb 2:1.15.1-0ubuntu2
gems
- cucumber 1.3.14
- selenium-webdriver 2.41.0
- headless 1.0.1

The tests aren't especially stressful. Basic navigation and CRUD (local database)

SciencePiggy
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  • According to cpubenchmark.net, the i7-4770S is almost twice as fast as the E5-2620 on a single-thread basis. Is your workload CPU-intensive? – Mark Plotnick Jun 06 '14 at 01:44
  • If you run the test on the hosts instead of the VMs, do you see the same difference in execution time? – Mark Plotnick Jun 06 '14 at 01:46
  • Thanks for the feedback and sorry for the slow response. The cucumber process is using a combination of xvfb with headless and selenium-webdriver gems. There's nothing particularly stressful or IO intensive about the test cases but firefox is taking 100% CPU as seen from top. – SciencePiggy Jun 09 '14 at 18:52
  • Added more info to the original post – SciencePiggy Jun 09 '14 at 19:04
  • Firefox should never take that much CPU under normal circumstances - you might have a JS issue on your page somewhere. – probablyup Aug 03 '14 at 19:23

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