Due to their minimum consideration to an actual network topology, the existing peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks will lead to high latency and low efficiency. In TaChord, we present a study of topology-aware routing approaches in P2P overlays, and present an improved design in Chord. We evaluate TaChord and other algorithms by physical hops, interdomain-adjusted latency, and aggregate bandwidth used per message. From experimental results TaChord shows the drastic improvement in routing performance. Finally, we show that the impact of cache management strategies in the TaChord overlay can’t be neglected.