High CPU Use - XP Guest on Windows 7 Host

[vbox4me2]

Have you disabled other exotic stuff such as 2d/3d acceleration, usb, etc... using smp only one core.

[tonny]

Hi,

I've been experiencing high CPU loads as well, when using NAT networking (Windows 7 host with Windows XP guest).
You should try and completely disable the Windows Firewall in the guest, that did the trick for me.


Cheers

[timrichardson]

I have the same problem as well; my host is Vista, on an XP guest. My guest is only allocated one cpu, but despite that both my cores run at 99%. This is a new problem, I guess with the latest version of Virtualbox. The guest itself is idle. I haven't noticed this problem in a linux guest, but I'll try now.

[cassowary]

Have you disabled other exotic stuff such as 2d/3d acceleration, usb, etc... using smp only one core.

2d/3d acceleration are both disabled. the vm is configured with one CPU.
other stuff like usb is enabled.

I have the same problem as well; my host is Vista, on an XP guest. My guest is only allocated one cpu, but despite that both my cores run at 99%. This is a new problem, I guess with the latest version of Virtualbox. The guest itself is idle. I haven't noticed this problem in a linux guest, but I'll try now.

yes my guest is idle too, the process on the host which takes all the resources is VirtualBox.exe.

[kidault]

tonny's suggestion solved my problem too. The real reason seems to be a bug which causes large volume of traffic on the ICS enabled NAT nic, aproximate 80MB in several seconds.

I have opened a public bugtrack for this kind of High cpu use problem(caused by high network traffic volume)
High CPU load when perform specific task in XP guest
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/5787

[TorbenRahbekKoch]

Hi everybody,

I experienced the same on two 32 bit XP installations (host: Windows 7 64 bit). One was SP2 and the other SP3. Both started to behave when I stopped and disabled the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) services on the two XP guest installations and have behaved since.

Hope this might work for others as well!

Regards,
Torben

[kidault]

a test release has been provided to solve the high cpu load problem caused by NAT and ICS in xp guest at this page.
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/5787
It has solved my problem, try it at your own risk.

[appyface]

I installed the test build, I've only been running the XP guest for 30 minutes or so, but so far so good for me too.

Kind regards,
--appyface

[cassowary]

Hi All,

I had my Windows XP guest running for a few days and it did not have high CPU usage until i did something on my Windows 7 host: change permissions on a file server. Then i stopped the Windows Firewall ICS service on the guest and the CPU usage dropped.

I have now installed the test build and restarted the firewall ICS service in the guest. I do not have high CPU usage for the moment.

[davidhbrown]

I'm having this issue, too, on 3.1.2... not sure if I want to jump to the test build, but I was able to get reasonable CPU usage by disabling the network interface of the guest. As I set up this WinXP SP2 x32 guest (Win 7 Pro x64 host) specifically for testing pages with IE7, that's not going to get me very far! I did notice that I was not able to select an adapter in bridged mode.

[lionelmanchippi]

Hey guys! I have downloaded the build, and it is much better but it still has the problem.

Everything was fine for about 5 hours (yeah, I use VMs all day), until I opened Google Chrome 4.0.249.78 (36714) with 5 tabs pointing to different sites. Unfortunately, the processor of my host was taken again to 100%, while the processor of the Guest seems to be perfectly well (2/3%).

Host --> Windows 7 Pro x86
Guest --> Windows XP SP3 Pro x86

Both are legit windows fully updated. Inside the guest I have nothing more than Chrome/Opera/FireFox and WinDBG.

Also, I tried (as suggested here) to disable Firewall with no luck. Even with FW disabled the processor continues at 100%.

The only thing (without rebooting, of course) that helped to go everything back to normal was closing Chrome. But it is important to realize that insdide the VM, it was not using processor at all! After closing Chorme (10 seconds after that) the processor of the Host went back to normal (5%).

Thanks!
Lionel.

[merkk]

I just ran into this issue as well. I found a partial fix of setting the process affinity to a single cpu. This lowered the cpu usage but memory usage became a problem. It would just start increasing and not stop. As soon as i saw that happening again, i stopped the windows firewall service on the guest host and the memory usage stopped increasing.

[ddsingh90]

there might be some error with chrome
I get the same problem with chrome but not with firefox
I have been running the virtual machine for about 8 hours it doens't give any problem otherwise
try uninstalling google chrome

[lionelmanchippi]

Hey ddsingh90!

Even if there were a problem in Chrome, it is not taking anything of the processor of the guest. Check it out: go to the guest with Chrome and watch the processor. In fact, running run Chrome on the Host generates no visible problems. It seems to me that it's more like a networking problem that is not correctly handled by VBox. If you watch this full thread you will see that some people got better resutls by disabling the FireWall.

In other words, it seems to be a problem related with Networking, not with Chrome.

Thanks!
Lionel.

[dizid]

I have the exact same problem on win7 home ed. host and xp sp3 guest on virtualbox 3.1.2, guest additions work fine.
I had the same guest box running on a 5 year old PC (win 7 RC) with no problems (except that the processor was old and not up to the task) but now i have a dual core Intel with 4GB RAM and i am using the same guest PC. The CPU usage goes to 95-100% after some time, although it can run for hours with no problems. I think it has to do with the browsing.
I also use Chrome and the strange thing is that i can not discover which process is causing the high CPU: it does not seem to be a process on the guest PC.

Here's the log

vb-log.txt

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