They‘re forcing you to virtualize your production SVN server. Your physical server has eight physical cores that can act as sixteen thanks to hyper-threading.

The virtual machine they give you has two cores.

You ask for sixteen. They hold at two. You make the switch-over and go live and the new virtual machine tanks. You ask for sixteen cores and they ask you to contact the software vendor to ask for a guide on virtualization performance tuning. You escalate.

Half a day later they give you four cores.

Four cores can keep up for almost five minutes of truly serious load before tanking. You mention that adding cores seems to be improving. They argue why this should not be working–using arguments from theory. You point to the performance monitoring and ask for sixteen cores.

Three hours of arguing later they give you six cores.

You and they are all on the same conference call. You and they are both watching the CPU load. It takes almost fifteen minutes to get the CPUs to peg with six cores. You wearily ask for a mere eight cores.

They give you eight cores and ask you to not mention this to anyone else because, obviously, you’re the 1% of the virtual machine user population and they don’t want this getting around. Theoretically you should have been okay with two cores after all.

Little over an hour later of work under an artificially heavy load and the machine with eight CPU cores hasn’t hung.

Huh.

How was your day?