Benchmarking VirtIO Performance Within DigitalOcean's Cloud

How does toggling VirtIO affect the performance of virtual machines / droplets within DigitalOcean's public cloud? Here's some benchmarks.

DigitalOcean's cloud makes it easy to enable/disable VirtIO when making a new droplet. VirtIO is designed to enhance I/O performance around block devices (storage) and network interfaces. In continuing from yesterday's article about trying out and benchmarking the DigitalOcean cloud, I ran some tests of the quad-core instance with 8GB of RAM and 80GB of storage with and without VirtIO.

The results from this quick VirtIO comparison with looking at the Linux disk performance using Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org with 1403244-PL-VIRTIO81898.
VirtIO should generally enhance the disk performance for virtual machines...
But in some Linux disk benchmarks, disabling VirtIO led to better results.
Again, see all of the results on OpenBenchmarking.org from the DigitalOcean public cloud with Ubuntu Linux. Easily run your own cloud Linux benchmarks with the Phoroni Test Suite.