I have a new Dual Quad-Core Clovertown (E5310) with a RAID5 and when I run unixbench (the wht variant) I get these results...
Default CentOS4 Kernel (2.6.9smp):
Start Benchmark Run: Thu Apr 12 22:01:07 EDT 2007
 22:01:07 up 1 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.20, 0.08, 0.03
End Benchmark Run: Thu Apr 12 22:11:14 EDT 2007
 22:11:14 up 11 min,  1 user,  load average: 27.25, 10.54, 4.39
                     INDEX VALUES
TEST                                        BASELINE     RESULT      INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables        376783.7 73062884.2     1939.1
Double-Precision Whetstone                      83.1     1452.6      174.8
Execl Throughput                               188.3    11972.2      635.8
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks         2672.0    90568.0      339.0
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           1077.0    22404.0      208.0
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks        15382.0  1112686.0      723.4
Pipe-based Context Switching                 15448.6  1536903.0      994.8
Pipe Throughput                             111814.6  7310880.6      653.8
Process Creation                               569.3    48057.5      844.2
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                    44.8     2787.1      622.1
System Call Overhead                        114433.5  8538136.8      746.1
                                                                 =========
     FINAL SCORE                                                     586.1
Kernel 2.6.18-stab027-smp:
Start Benchmark Run: Thu Apr 12 21:29:33 EDT 2007
 21:29:33 up 1 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.22, 0.11, 0.04
End Benchmark Run: Thu Apr 12 21:39:43 EDT 2007
 21:39:43 up 11 min,  1 user,  load average: 25.45, 10.04, 4.23
                     INDEX VALUES
TEST                                        BASELINE     RESULT      INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables        376783.7 71079686.4     1886.5
Double-Precision Whetstone                      83.1     1456.2      175.2
Execl Throughput                               188.3     4733.3      251.4
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks         2672.0   120019.0      449.2
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           1077.0    32769.0      304.3
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks        15382.0  1125105.0      731.4
Pipe-based Context Switching                 15448.6   415588.7      269.0
Pipe Throughput                             111814.6  6285422.1      562.1
Process Creation                               569.3    11449.0      201.1
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                    44.8     1505.2      336.0
System Call Overhead                        114433.5  8894040.1      777.2
                                                                 =========
     FINAL SCORE                                                     416.8
Any idea why it would be such a big performance loss?  It seems like the system has trouble with Pipe-based Context Switching, Process Creation, Shell Scripts and Execl Throughput.
I know that 2.6.18 has a problem with the CPU scheduler but I tested it on the rhel4 stable openvz 2.6.9 and turned up even worse results (around 350 final score).
		
		[Updated on: Fri, 13 April 2007 06:23]
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