I am running a 32-bit Linux virtual machine on KVM. The host machine is a 64-bit Linux machine connected to a LAN.  Attempting to transfer files with scp from the KVM machine to a server on the LAN gives abysmal performance, about 500kB/s over gigabit Ethernet.  Around 1% of the expected rate.  Any suggestions?
Poor network performance from KVM virtual machine
networking;kvm;file transfer
Consider using virtio. It allows a direct connection between the VM and the host without the need to emulate (slow) hardware. I measured high network performance improvements with it.For example, you can enable the virtio network device by the kvm command line parameter -net nic,model=virtio.If you are using the virtio block devices, please note that the new device names are then vda1 etc., but this should be not a problem since current Linux distributions detect the partitions according to their UUIDs.