Comment 4 for bug 741887

savevm _is_ slow, because it's writing to a qcow2 file with full (meta)data allocation which is terrible slow since 0.13 (and 0.12.5) unless you use cache=unsafe. It's the same slowdown as observed with default cache mode when performing an operating system install into a freshly created qcow2 - it may take several hours. To verify, run `iostat -dkx 5' and see how busy (the last column) your disk is during the save - I suspect it'll be about 100%.