Re: Virtio network performance poorer than emulated e1000

Freddie Cash
2010-07-22T21:28:23Z

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Balachandar <bala1486@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can see that virtio network performance is poorer than emaulated
> e1000 nic. I did some simple ping test and with emulated e1000 the
> average rtt is around 600 microsec. With virtio the average rtt is 800
> microsec. I am using a tap + bridge configuration. I run kvm as
> follows
>
> kvm -m 512 -hda vdisk.img \
> -net nic,model=virtio \
> -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=qemu-ifup,downscript=no
>
> I am running Debian squeeze distribution with guest and host kernel 2.6.34.
>
> Does anyone else see some results like this or is it only me? Could
> changing the distribution help as i am running a testing one?

Have you done any testing beyond "ping"? Doing network throughput
tests using ping is equivalent to using dd to benchmark disk drives:
aka pointless.

Do network file transfers. Use a network benchmarking tool. Do
something more in-depth than "ping".

--
Freddie Cash
fjwcash@gmail.com