slow performance on new (2017) retina iMac

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Mac OS X hosts.
davey jenk
Posts: 10
Joined: 20. Jun 2017, 22:32

Re: slow performance on new (2017) retina iMac

Post by davey jenk »

mpack, thanks again, sincerely. part of the problem i am sure here is that i know just enough to get myself in trouble and not enough to solve anything. i am a designer, not a programmer, and i see a pretty gui graph that slides 0-8 and i pick the one in the middle in the green area.

i spent the morning getting into adjusting more and more of the settings in virtual box. when i clicked both enable 2D and 3D acceleration on the display tab, and increased video memory to 256, one of those items did the trick. it's now responding 4-5x as fast as before and very usable.

fwiw, i have adjusted the processor slider back to 4 and allocated 9GB ram to the VM and both windows and mac sides are working great.

thanks to all of you for your help efforts and a great product.
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39134
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: slow performance on new (2017) retina iMac

Post by mpack »

davey jenk wrote: fwiw, i have adjusted the processor slider back to 4 and allocated 9GB ram to the VM and both windows and mac sides are working great.
Do NOT give the VM 4 cores. That setting was wrong. The fact that it wasn't the only thing wrong didn't make it less wrong.

The RAM issue is more marginal. You are not quite overcommitting host RAM, but you're getting close. In a different day you might exhaust all your RAM and the VM may crash and/or cause widespread performance problems. Unless you know that your VM will suffer without it, I would reduce this to a safe level as I already said. I would go with 8GB.
socratis
Site Moderator
Posts: 27329
Joined: 22. Oct 2010, 11:03
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Win(*>98), Linux*, OSX>10.5
Location: Greece

Re: slow performance on new (2017) retina iMac

Post by socratis »

davey jenk wrote:why does my slider in virtual box go up to 8 if there are only 4?
If it helps, it used to be green until your 4 CPUs, orange up to 8 and red until 12. That was a certain way to kill your host. They "fixed" that... ;)

And yes, as mpack said, 9 GB might be good now, but not tomorrow. In reality I've never, ever, needed more than 4 GB, and that VM was doing source code compilation. I don't know your specific needs, but the first thing that I do on every system, host or guest, it to get a system resource monitor, activity monitor or task manager (whatever you want to call it). That's the first thing that's running on every OS I've used/am using. If I allocated 9 GB to my guest and it only needed 2 GB, I know that I just wasted 7 good GB...
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Olliedog00
Posts: 14
Joined: 30. Oct 2018, 08:58

Re: slow performance on new (2017) retina iMac

Post by Olliedog00 »

Hi
Did you ever resolve your slow performance on the 2017 Retina Mac. I have exactly the same problem and although the guys have been extremely helpful in the forum, I still have not been up to resolve the problem. Just wondering if you found a cure?
socratis
Site Moderator
Posts: 27329
Joined: 22. Oct 2010, 11:03
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Win(*>98), Linux*, OSX>10.5
Location: Greece

Re: slow performance on new (2017) retina iMac

Post by socratis »

@Olliedog00
You have your own dedicated thread. Please stick to it. Do not wake up other, older threads. The next message to another thread that's not dedicated to you, will be removed...
Do NOT send me Personal Messages (PMs) for troubleshooting, they are simply deleted.
Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.
If you obfuscate any information requested, I will obfuscate my response. These are virtual UUIDs, not real ones.
paxo
Posts: 1
Joined: 28. May 2019, 08:02

Re: slow performance on new (2017) retina iMac

Post by paxo »

I ended up here in May 2018 after upgrading Mac to Mojave what forced me to upgrade Virtual Box to 6.0.
Performance of NetApps image (Oracle on Linux) degraded just by upgrading Virtual Box.
I played with settings and it seems everything is back to "normal".

I changed:
System - Processor - Processors: from 1 to 2 cores
Display - Screen - Video Memory: from 16 to 64 MB
Display - Screen - Scale Factor: to 125%
Display - Screen - Graphics Controller: to VBoxSVGA
Audio: disabled

Although, I do not know and didn't check one-by-one which setting(s) made the change, it is obviously doable ;)
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