I sense that this is just a gut feeling. Or do you have the numbers to back that up? DosBox has JIT, and a VM is essentially the same as DosEMU (virtualization)

I sense that this is just a gut feeling. Or do you have the numbers to back that up? DosBox has JIT, and a VM is essentially the same as DosEMU (virtualization), so I highly doubt the performance difference would amount to more than just a few percent. Also, for DOS application, "raw performance" rarely matters, as those were programmed to run on a 486