Qemu slow disk throughput

Izhar Firdaus Follow Support Mar 07, 2008 · 1 min read

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

I am doing some development for a UN community site, using Zope/Plone. I uses Qemu for hosting the guest OS for my development environment.

For 2 days, I keep wondering why Zope/Plone loads damn slow on the qemu machine eventhough I have allocated both cores of the processor, and 512RAM for it. 15 minutes simply to start up is really not desirable. I kept on investigating and guess what:

[root@unapcict ~]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   18 MB in  3.03 seconds =   5.95 MB/sec

Just for a comparison, the host hdd's speed:

[root@Nobuyuki ~]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  174 MB in  3.01 seconds =  57.71 MB/sec

Darn.. So, thats what the reason. Dear lazywebs, anybody know how to improve the speed??.

Written by Izhar Firdaus Follow Support

I'm a system architect, data engineer and developer advocate with passion in Free / Open Source software, entrepreneurship, community building, education and martial art. I take enjoyment in bridging and bringing together different FOSS technologies to help businesses and organizations utilize IT infrastructure to aid and optimize their business and organizational process.