Do snapshots degrade performance?

Lonnie

Renowned Member
Sep 16, 2014
80
6
73
If you were to schedule a snapshot to occur (on virtual machine) 4 times per day (every 6 hours), would this degrade the virtual machine's performance at all (on Proxmox 3.3)?

I'm especially interested in the performance hit:
  • during the time a snapshot is being created
  • after the snapshot has been created
  • as the number of snapshots increase

How do these 3 scenarios effect performance?

I don't know how much this applies to Proxmox 3.3, but generally I'm reading:

"Virtual machines are degraded as more snapshots are taken. Performance degradation is based on how long the snapshot or snapshot tree is in place, the depth of the tree, and how much the virtual machine and its guest operating system have changed from the time you originally took the snapshot. NOTE: This performance issue can be resolved depending on your type of hypervisor such as Xenserver coalescing and KVM merging snapshots using lvconvert; which will reduce the length of the snapshot tree." (see source).
 
Last edited:
Hi,

It's depend of your storage.

qcow2 file snapshot : possibly a little bit
zfs snasphot : no
ceph snapshot : not sure about it
lvm : clearly yes, but they should be use only temporary for backup. (proxmox don't support lvm for vm snapshot)
 

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