socratis wrote:A couple of things:
1) You are assigning 4096+128+(SomeOverhead) MB of memory to your guest out of the 4630 MB available at the start of the VM. If you open too many files on the host (via the shared folders) the host file-cache will put your host under stress with all sorts of slow downs as your host is paging memory in and out.
2) Did you try the solution mentioned by the OP?
Chapter 12.3.9 Long delays when accessing shared folders?
3) Did you actually observe the problem in the VBox.log that you posted? Because I see nothing out of the ordinary in the 13 minutes that the VM run.
Hi, thanks for replying. I will answer your questions and suggestions in turn. To test whether any change I have made has fixed the issue I came up with a standardized test. I have a program that I use that opens up two images side-by-side for quick comparison. I opened a series of images using this program, then ~10 minutes later I opened the same series of images again. Using a stop-watch, I timed how long it took to finish loading a pair of images from the moment I hit "Load" until the images were visible. All load times referenced below are the average of loading the same 6 pairs of images.
1) I first wanted to check your comment about memory handling, because that made the most sense: If my host system is running out of RAM, that could certainly explain my slow-downs. So I changed the amount of RAM allocated to the guest to 2 GB, and I confirmed that my host was not swapping to disk or compressing memory used by VirtualBox while running my tests. After a fresh reboot of both the host and the guest, it took on average 11 seconds (s) to load a pair of images. ~10 minutes later, it took 28 s, an increase of ~2.5x. So I'm still having the issue, even after making sure I have plenty of memory for both my host and guest.
I next wanted to rule out the possibility that my external USB 3.0 hard disk that contains the image files was the root of the trouble. So instead of accessing the files twice, I accessed the files only once for each fresh reboot, but I altered how long I waited to begin the task. If I started loading the images immediately after Windows got to the desktop, it took on average 10 s to load a pair of images. If I let the guest system sit for ~10 minutes after a fresh reboot of Windows, then it took on average 30 s to load a pair of images. From this I concluded that the problem isn't dependent on the number of times I access a file, but is dependent on how long my Windows guest has been running.
To confirm that my external disk was fine, I moved to my work PC, where using the same program to load pairs of images from the same USB hard disk took 11 s to load a pair of images from a fresh reboot and ~8 s on average to load a pair of images 10 minutes later.
2) I then moved back to my laptop to test your second suggestion. Editing the lmhosts.sam file as Chapter 12.3.9 suggests had no effect: From a fresh reboot, loading a pair of images took 11 s, and then took 28 s 10 minutes later.
I then wanted to address the issue that I'm using an old, unsupported version of VirtualBox. All of the previous tests were performed on Vbox 4.3. I updated to 5.1.4, then installed the updated Guest Additions in the Guest. After a fresh reboot, loading a pair of images took 12 s, and then took 127 s ~10 minutes later. So the problem is not solved by upgrading to v5.1.4, but may actually be worse.
3) I am not well versed in reading these log files, but I can tell you that I experienced the slow-downs within 11-15 min of starting the virtual machine. I'll attach the logfile from one of my recent tests. (The most recent from the 5.1.4 test is too big to attach at 144 MB.)
I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me fix this. My VM has worked for me for months, and this problem is incredibly frustrating!
