Extremely Slow Windows 10 Guest Performance (OS X Host)

[DondeEstaLaBiblioteca]

Hi all,

I just installed Windows 10 as a guest using virtualbox, my host being Mac OS 10.12.5 Sierra. The performance is extremely slow on Windows, but performance is still strong on Mac OS and I feel like I have tried everything now. I've attached the log - can anyone give any insight?

[socratis]

00:00:01.386174 Installed Extension Packs:
00:00:01.386184   None installed!

Installing the ExtPack would help you a lot with USB devices, since the ExtPack enables USB2/3, among other things. You can download it from the usual place: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

00:00:29.637702 VMMDev: Guest Log: VBoxMP::DriverEntry: 3D is NOT supported by the host, falling back to display-only mode..

It's impressive that VirtualBox says that 3D is not supported. I can't say that I've seen this on a Mac before. From the logs it looks that you have the mid 2014 MacBookPro 13" Retina with the i5-4278U CPU @ 2.60GHz. That model has an Intel Iris 5100 graphics card and I don't see anywhere in the specifications a stand-alone GPU. Can you download a little program called gfxCardStatus and see if that's the case? Do you have 3D enabled in the VM settings?

00:00:01.460394 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000002 (2)
00:00:01.655945 CPUM: Logical host processors: 4 present, 4 max, 4 online, online mask: 000000000000000f
00:00:01.655949 CPUM: Physical host cores: 2

You have assigned all your CPUs to the VM. The host is going to run low on resources, since VirtualBox cares about physical processors, not logical ones. See: CPU Cores versus threads. You should take the number of vCPUs to 1 in the guest. Windows 10 is not going to be very happy about it, but it's going to run just fine...

[BroderO]

What I have seen over the years is that you should never use more than the number of CPUs the "Settings" > "System" > "Processor" tells you divided by 2.
I am assuming your system tells you 4, so setting it at 2, you should be good! That is what I run on my Mac (2013 Haswell Corei5 2.6GHz).

If you do more than CPUs/2, you will see serious slowdowns on the guest/host!