<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; color: #000000'>Could you try : 1. Share a folder from winxp 2. From another box start copying a large file to the winxp share 3. Observe loadavg on the kvm host Both with default settings and cache=none I was getting loadavg ~35 ( on a 2xXeon E5520 ) with the default setting and read/write speeds around 20Mb/s . With cache=none the loadavg dropped to ~3 and the speeds increased to 40Mb/s. The host is ubuntu 10.04. The guest is ubuntu 10.04 with raw image as disk. <hr id="zwchr">From: "Thomas Fjellstrom" <tfjellstrom@shaw.ca> To: virt-tools-list@redhat.com Sent: Friday, August 20, 2010 12:00:41 PM Subject: Re: [virt-tools-list] Default use of caching on raw volumes After seeing this thread I tried to see what would happen with a windows xp guest using lvm+virtio and changing the cache option to none. Performance drops about 10-20MB/s. Whatever the default is, I get an average of 55MB/s read according to hd-tune. With cache=none I get more like 35-40MB/s. -- <hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"> Nikolai K. Bochev System Administrator </div></body></html>