Empirical study on the discrepancy between performance testing results from virtual and physical environments

Abstract

Large software systems often undergo performance tests to ensure their capability to handle expected loads. These performance tests often consume large amounts of computing resources and time since heavy loads need to be generated. Making it worse, the ever evolving field requires frequent updates to the performance testing environment. In practice, virtual machines (VMs) are widely exploited to provide flexible and less costly environments for performance tests. However, the use of VMs may introduce confounding overhead (e.g., a higher than expected memory utilization with unstable I/O traffic) to the testing environment and lead to unrealistic performance testing results. Yet, little research has studied the impact on test results of using VMs in performance testing activities.