Ian Briggs, Matt Day, Eric Eide, Yuankai Guo, and Peter Marheine are conducting performance research on unikernels, and have thoughtfully posted some preliminary work on OSv performance.

The team tested OSv for DNS and HTTP, and got some encouraging results.

The lighttpd web server on OSv performs consistently well up through 5000 requests/second. And on DNS tests, Linux can sustain a response rate of about 19000 per second, while OSv can handle approximately 28000 requests per second, with slightly lower latency.

The preliminary paper is Performance Evaluation of OSv for Server Applications (local copy).

The researchers did run into a bug running OSv on Xen, so we’re all looking forward to helping them track that down on the osv-dev mailing list. In the meantime, watch this space, or follow @CloudiusSystems on Twitter, for more links to OS research in progress.