Re: XP guests sluggish after around 1 week of uptime

Avi Kivity
2009-01-12T13:36:28Z

Jay Mann wrote:
> If this is the wrong place to ask this question, please let me know.
>
> I’m running kvm-80 on ubuntu 8.04 x64 kernel 2.6.24-22-server, md raid 5 with
> LVM. When my host is first booted my windows XP guest runs fine, but after
> around a week or so of uptime, they start to run very sluggish. It takes around
> a minute just to open the start menu.
>
> I'm starting to wonder if it is a problem with kvm (qemu) disk performance. The
> Read/Write speeds seems to be half as fast as my VMWare XP guest. But not sure
> why this would happen after running fine for around a week.
>
> I have the XP guest set to use 2GB of ram and disabled the paging file but that
> still doesn’t help.
>

How much memory do you have on the host? Is the host swapping? Can you
post 'vmstat 1' output while Windows is opening the start menu?