I have 2 Xeon E5 2690s (eight core, 2.9Ghz) and 384 ram so not short of resources. I'm trying UnRAID (used to ESXI) as it seems to be interesting and I've seen a fair bit of buzz about it lately so wanted to give it a go before I purchase.

 

However I'm having some serious issues with performance on VMs. I first noticed that the Linux VM felt rather laggy and today have installed Windows 10 which will be my main VM (headless) for some development and gaming.

 

My Windows 10 VM is configured with 8 pinned cores (16 threads) and 16gb ram - core 8 onwards so it should all be on one physical CPU.

 

I've run a Cinebench R20 score which was disappointing - 684. I've also run a Geekbench 5 score - an appalling 235 single and 1841 multicore.

 

For context, I have another machine using an AMD Opteron 3280 (8 core, 2.4ghz) running Windows 10 with only 4 cores assigned through ESXI that pulls in 384 on single core...

 

Sometime seems badly wrong? Diagnostics attached.

powerpig-diagnostics-20190919-1816.zip

I think I've found why... for some reason the CPUs are clocking well below where they should (even though Windows reports it's pegged at 2.9Ghz).

 

Whilst running Geekbench in Windows, if I do a cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz:

 

root@PowerPig:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz
cpu MHz		: 1199.905
cpu MHz		: 1199.911
cpu MHz		: 1199.913
cpu MHz		: 1199.919
cpu MHz		: 1199.899
cpu MHz		: 1199.899
cpu MHz		: 1199.894
cpu MHz		: 1199.908
cpu MHz		: 1199.895
cpu MHz		: 1199.925
cpu MHz		: 1199.909
cpu MHz		: 1199.907
cpu MHz		: 1199.911
cpu MHz		: 1199.905
cpu MHz		: 1199.905
cpu MHz		: 1199.907
cpu MHz		: 1199.897
cpu MHz		: 1199.887
cpu MHz		: 1199.900
cpu MHz		: 1199.910
cpu MHz		: 1199.934
cpu MHz		: 1199.902
cpu MHz		: 1199.906
cpu MHz		: 1199.893
cpu MHz		: 1199.889
cpu MHz		: 1199.903
cpu MHz		: 1199.907
cpu MHz		: 1199.910
cpu MHz		: 1199.909
cpu MHz		: 1199.910
cpu MHz		: 1199.911
cpu MHz		: 1199.912

Now to figure out why..

That much RAM might cause an issue with hugepages. Could also be NUMA issues.

I think I’ve got it figured out - I was using PSU2 and idrac gave a critical power warning (wasn’t happy that PSU1 was either not present or not being used) which I believe was causing it to throttle. 
 

I’ve switched to PSU1 and changed the profile to “performance” in BIOS and I’m getting the performance now that I’d expect.