Re: BTRFS: Unbelievably slow with kvm/qemu

From: Josef Bacik
Date: Sun Aug 29 2010 - 20:11:57 EST


On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 09:34:29PM +0200, Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
>> There are a lot of variables when using qemu.
>>
>> The most important one are:
>>
>> - the cache mode on the device. The default is cache=writethrough,
>> which is not quite optimal. You generally do want to use cache=none
>> which uses O_DIRECT in qemu.
>> - if the backing image is sparse or not.
>> - if you use barrier - both in the host and the guest.
>
> I noticed that when btrfs is mounted with default options, when writing
> i.e. 10 GB on the KVM guest using qcow2 image, 20 GB are written on the
> host (as measured with "iostat -m -p").
>
>
> With ext4 (or btrfs mounted with nodatacow), 10 GB write on a guest
> produces 10 GB write on the host.
>

Whoa 20gb? That doesn't sound right, COW should just mean we get quite a bit of
fragmentation, not write everything twice. What exactly is qemu doing? Thanks,

Josef
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