I finally got the pony I’ve been asking for.

There’s a very interesting (and impactful) performance optimization coming to RHEL6.4.  For years we’ve had to do this sort of tuning manually, but thanks to the power of open source, this magical feature has been implemented and is headed your way in RHEL6.4 (try it in the beta!)

What is this magical feature…is it a double-rainbow ?  Yes.  All the way.

It’s vhost thread affinity via virsh emulatorpin.

If you’re familiar with the vhost_net network infrastructure added to Linux, it moves the network I/O out of the main qemu userspace thread to a kthread called vhost-$PID (where $PID is the PPID of the main KVM process for the particular guest).  So if your KVM guest is PID 12345, you would also see a [vhost-12345] process.

Anyway…
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