Is it me or is FreeBSD slower on Xen than Linux?

[rainer at ultra-secure.de]

Hi,

I've got a problem.



For a customer, I run a VM in Xen that should perform a certain task in 
PHP (written using the ZendFrameWork).

That task takes about 18-20 seconds on FreeBSD 10.3 amd64, MariaDB 
5.5.0, php 5.5.37 in a VM that has 8 vCPUs and 16GB of memory
The "reference" server that the customer uses is somewhere else and 
manages to perform the same task in 3s.

I've tried this with FreeBSD 10.3, PHP7.0 and MariaDB 10.1 and it takes 
about 9s.

I've tried it on physical hardware with 10.3, PHP5.5, MariaDB 5.5 and it 
also takes about 9s (that machine hosts a load of other sites but has 
lot of cores and memory available).


Then, I've installed an Ubuntu 14 VM in XenServer. It comes with PHP5.5 
and MariaDB 5.5 by default. It's VM with 2vCPUs and 8GB RAM.

There, the script take about 9s, too (just as if it was running on 
physical FreeBSD).

So, is this expected? Did I do something wrong?


We don't run XenServer directly, but use it as part of an Apache 
CloudStack "Private Cloud".
Version is 6.5 SP-something (will have to ask if that is important).

The template I use for FreeBSD installation I created myself, by 
installing from an ISO and selection "FreeBSD 10" as OS.

Originally, it was using ZFS for the database-directory, but I moved 
that to UFS (didn't really lead to a performance break-through, though).



What else can I do?



Best Regards,
Rainer