[Spice-devel] Question about poor performance of Ubuntu VMs

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

I'm a big Red Hat / clone slash Fedora guy... and I use use a lot of KVM.  I primarily create Fedora, RHEL/clone, and Windows KVM guests and they work great... but every once in a while I like to try out an Ubuntu release just to see what's new.  I have tried their Unity spin as well as their Xubuntu spin... for a few releases now.  I'd expect Unity to be slow because it is similar to GNOME 3 in that it wants to do that 3D stuff.  But with Xubuntu and XFCE, I'd expect it to be snappy.  That has NOT been my experience.  It is really slow.  Moving a window around is extremely choppy and it can even lag out (where it doesn't respond at all) for periods of time.  I haven't done much troubleshooting of this but I have done a few installs on a variety of hardware (for the host node) and used a variety of client machines and the pokey experience has been the same.

I suspect it has something to do with the mouse emulation used because the Xubuntu desktop seems to perform fairly well until the mouse is moved.

Any ideas?  Maybe there is some configuration change either in KVM or in Xubuntu that will improve the situation.  I use virt-manager to create the guests (on Fedora and RHEL) and pick the closest Ubuntu version listed.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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