Bad Mumble control channel performance in KVM guest
- by aef
I'm running a Mumble server (Murmur) on a Debian Wheezy Beta 4 KVM guest which runs on a Debian Wheezy Beta 4 KVM hypervisor. The guest machines are attached to a bridge device on the hypervisor system through Virtio network interfaces. The Hypervisor is attached to a 100Mbit/s uplink and does IP-routing between the guest machines and the remaining Internet.
In this setup we're experiencing a clearly recognizable lag between double-clicking a channel in the client and the channel joining action happening. This happens with a lot of different clients between 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 on Linux and Windows systems.
Voice quality and latency seems to be completely unaffected by this. Most of the times the client's information dialog states a 16ms latency for both the voice and control channel. The deviation for the control channels mostly is a lot higher than the one of the voice channels. In some situations the control channel is displayed with a 100ms ping and about 1000 deviation. It seems the TCP performance is a problem here.
We had no problems on an earlier setup which was in principle quite like the new one. We used Debian Lenny based Xen hypervisor and a soft-virtualised guest machine instead and an earlier version of the Mumble 1.2.3 series.
The current murmurd --version says:
1.2.3-349-g315b5f5-2.1
