Fix I/O latency of Linux VMs under Virtualization Station on QNAP with VIRTIO
updated on September 4, 2024By Christian Pfundtner
Running Linux VMs under Virtualization Station (based on QEMU) on a QNAP NAS storage suffers from I/O latency performance problems. For the analysis, I installed the Oracle 23ai Free Edition in an Oracle Linux 8 VM and measured the IO performance using I/O Calibration. It is already obvious during startup (which took almost 15 minutes!!) that something is wrong. Using TOP you can also see that the system is permanently stuck in Wait I/O.
The latest versions of Oracle Linux 8.10 and (23.4) were used for testing.
These values for IOPS and MBPS are extremely low and the latency is iraq telegram data very high – even hard disks should deliver better values.
If you search the Internet for QNAP and I/O performance or latency problems, you will find many articles – most of them related to Windows – and describe that installing VIRTIO drivers under Windows should solve the problem.
However, there are no useful recommendations for the many hits for Linux. Since the VIRTIO drivers are not installed automatically in most distributions during a default installation of Linux, you have to install them afterwards.