Recently, Thomson Reuters "demonstrated that RMDS [Reuters Marked Data Systems software] performs better in a virtualized environment with Solaris Containers than it does with a number of individual Sun server machines."

This enabled Thomson Reuters to break the "million-messages-per-second barrier."

The performance improvement is probably due to the extremely high bandwidth, low latency characteristics of inter-Container network communications. Because all inter-Container network traffic is accomplished with memory transfers - using default settings - packets 'move' at computer memory speeds, which are much better than common 100Mbps or 1Gbps ethernet bandwidth. Further, that network performance is much more consistent without extra hardware - switches and routers - that can contribute to latency.

Articles can be found at: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Sun-Microsystems-and-Thomson-bw-14306924.html