An Updated Performance Comparison of Virtual Machines and Linux Containers [pdf]
The first graph is already misleading, it's the graph about linpack. It shows that linpack is halved in performance in KVM, the explanation:
".. unless the system topology
is faithfully carried forth into the virtualized environment.
CPU-bound programs that don’t attempt such tuning will
likely have equal but equally poor performance across na-
tive, Docker, and KVM"<p>Seriously? I am the only one who adds a simple parameter when launching KVM. In more production/deployment environments higher level libraries like Libvirt are hopefully used and handle CPU settings automagically.<p>Then we have the MySQL tests. Comparing qcow (KVM) filesystems against native and AUFS.. Really, at least make it a fair fight and include a test which passthroughs the KVM IO to something remotely bare metalish, like a LVM volume.