VritualBox decreases battery life significantly

[mhodgkin]

Hello,

On my intel macbook I notice as soon as I boot my virtual linux machine the predicted battery life decreases by several hours, which is not good for working on the move if I only get 2 hours battery.

I am using the latest virtual box and I wonder if there is any way to tweak the configuration to make it less power hungry so I can get more battery life?

I already tried tweaking the power saving on the mac but this is a small effect compared to the effect of virtual box on power consumption.

Thanks,

Mark

[frank]

The battery life depends a lot of the load, that is, how much of the host CPU it takes to execute the guest. For instance, some Linux distributions compile the Linux kernel with a kernel timer frequency of 1000HZ (e.g, AFAIR Fedora). Re-compiling the kernel with HZ=100 can significantly reduce the overhead. Apart from this, more virtual devices add more CPU load as well. For instance, it is known that enabling the USB controller for a VM increases the load, so disable USB if not required by the guest.

There are other hints in this forum, I would suggest you search for hints to reduce the CPU load.