VirtualBox performance terrible

[greg.harvey]

Hi all,

Latest VirtualBox downloaded from Oracle, HP EliteBook, 8GB RAM, 2 x dual-core processors, virtualization support enabled in the BIOS, VM running Windows Vista Business, with 4GB RAM and one core assigned. Linux kernel uses PAE which is also extended to VirtualBox.

VM boots OK, but after a few minutes of activity it gets slower and slower and slower until it is unusable. Disk activity, speed, etc. is normal at first but it slows right down, the CPU fails to cope, disk activity nearly stops, VM gets so slow just moving a desktop shortcut to the recycle bin takes several minutes. Opening anything is not an option.

It's almost as though something gets "full" after a few minutes and Windows/VirtualBox can't recover from that. The Linux (Fedora 14) host is fine. I'm typing away now with a dead Windows VM on one screen and a browser on the other, Linux is happy except that 4GB and 100% CPU (out of 400%) is dedicated to VirtualBox, so it doesn't feel like a Linux issue. Feels like a problem with VirtualBox. Fedora is blocking out the resource for it and performance just fine with the remaining 4GB RAM and 3 cores, but VirtualBox is not managing to achieve anything useful. I'm just left with a hanging Windows which I usually end up just resetting.

Any suggestions?

[glennzo]

No suggestions, just an "I concur" comment. I'm having fits with VirtualBox / Fedora 16 / Quad Core system. It's bad.

[Dutchy]

Performance is fine.
You could play with these settings to get it to perform better:
-IO APIC (for windows you shouldn't change this after installation.
-Chiptset
-IDE host I/O cache
-SATA host I/O cache
-Video settings

You can also try to restart the vboxdrv.service.
That helps for me to restore performance after a suspend.
Keep in mind that virtualization is quite complex and therefore incorporates many bugs.
You might have more luck finding the cause and solution of the problem at the Virtualbox forum.

[greg.harvey]

Originally Posted by Dutchy

Performance is fine.

For you, maybe. Not for me. ;-)

But thanks for the tips - and I'll post on the VirtualBox forum too.

[marko]

You didn't say,... do you have the Guest Additions for windows installed ? On some things it makes a big performance improvement. I don't think it would explain this though

[greg.harvey]

Cross-posting for reference purposes - thread on VirtualBox forums:
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=46068

---------- Post added at 06:31 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:28 PM ----------

@marko, not at the moment.

---------- Post added at 07:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:31 PM ----------

@marko, now installed, doesn't seem to have helped much I'm afraid. =(

[lensman3]

I set my virtualbox number of CPU's screen for XP to 1 cpu. If more than one CPU was set performance was bad. Windows 7 was a total loss as it kinda inched along. Finally killed Win7 a deleted it off my drive.

As a side light, I did brick my iphone once upgrading IOS using VirtualBox and XP. For some reason the USB emulation wouldn't do a correct reboot to upload the new IOS image. It had worked before during IOS upgrading.

[wt6g]

Virtualbox performance running Windows 7 is just fine. The issue is ioapic, which is automatically set to on if you assign more than one processor to the Windows 7 guest.

Fortunately, you can remove ioapic in Windows 7 by changing the driver and then not rebooting, but shutting down the guest, change the processor allocation to 1 in virtualbox, and then restarting the guest. With only 1 processor selected, ioapic will not be installed.

The increase in speed is about 10X when only one processor is assigned to Windows 7.

I don't know if the issue also effects Windows XP, but I believe it does. You can remove ioapic from Windows XP in a similar manner (there are good writeups on the web you can find with google, so no use in duplicating the step by step here for those who need more help. Simply google virtualbox ioapic remove and you'll find plenty of help.

While this solution works well (removing ioapic and assigning only 1 processor) there is definitely something wrong, since these are unexpected results - or are they? I have an i7 machine that runs W7 very nicely, but of course it installs ioapic and uses all of the cores. Unlike the virtual machine, I have no way to disable them, remove ioapic, and then see what the hardware actually does with 1 cpu.

Bottom line is that I'm not sure this is a virtualbox issue - it may be a microsoft issue. All I know for sure is that with ioapic enabled Windows is a dog, and without it and running a single CPU it appears to run just as fast in a vm as it does when installed on the core machine using all processors. I say, "appears" which is a subjective observation. I run W7 because of Onenote, and some of the things I do with it are pretty compute intensive. With ioapic enabled the vm is unusable.

I don't know how this effects other virtual managers.

As mentioned by other posters, disk cache, stata drive, and memory resources are all big factors in performance. There are also some network issues with W7 that are hard to resolve and keep them that way - fortunately they are in the fluff part of W7. Specifically, Windows 7 will report via its tray icon that it is not connected to the internet when in fact it is and its working perfectly. I've fixed this but the error comes back with upgrades, and the fix is too time consuming. Its better to simply disable the tray icon that reports the non-error.

/Len

[ehrichweiss]

Sorry to join this so late but I don't think this has anything to do with IO/APIC. I get awesome performance so long as Virtualbox is the only "real" process running but the moment I start Google Chrome(Firefox doesn't give me this problem, for the record) the performance tanks making both the guest and host OSes lag. I have Virtualbox running right now and I'm using Firefox with little problem. If I start Chrome both will be unusable until I close Chrome.

I don't know what's special about Chrome(other than the fact that it uses separate processes for each tab/window) or if there are any other programs that cause this but that's something to look into as there's no doubt that there are no issues for me to report until Chrome enters the picture.