[WorksForMe] Debian Jessie Guest on Win10 Host dog slow using VirtualBox

[socratis]

Hi,

I upgraded from WIn7 Pro to Win10 Pro. VirtualBox 5.x on Win7 worked great, 6.x caused all kinds of problems. After upgrading to Win10, it was a bit slow so I upgraded VirtualBox, but another thread discusses the problems I had with 6. So on 5.x again, while it works in Win10, it is DOG SLOW! Why? How do I speed it up. Plenty of memory, enabled 3d, of course extensions are installed (shared folders are working).

TIA!!

[socratis]

Any 3rd party antivirus installed?

Check the status bar of your VM. Do you see the "slow" icon ()? If yes then you have some Hyper-V component enabled. Take a look at the topic "I have a 64bit host, but can't install 64bit guests" for some Hyper-V enablers that we're aware of so far.

If VirtualBox is running without Hyper-V enabled, where proper, hardware virtualization is actually available, then the standard virtualization icon () would show.

If that doesn't fix it, we need to see a complete VBox.log, from a complete VM run, where the problem occurs:

• Start the VM from cold-boot (not from a paused or saved state) / Observe problem / Shutdown the VM (force close it if you have to).
• With the VM completely shut down (not paused or saved), right-click on the VM in the VirtualBox Manager and select "Show Log".
• Save only the first "VBox.log", ZIP it and attach it to your response. See the "Upload attachment" tab below the reply form.

[dfatvb]

Hello,

Using Norton 360.

Log attached.

BTW the blue V shows up.

[dfatvb]

did that help?

[socratis]

00:00:03.840275 Guest OS type: 'Debian'

Are you 100% sure that you have the 32-bit version of Debian, and not the 64-bit one? Because you have selected the 32-bit version in your VM Settings...

00:00:03.848159 File system of 'C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxGuestAdditions.iso' (DVD) is ntfs
00:00:03.851514 File system of 'L:\virtualbox\debian_development jessy\Snapshots' (snapshots) is unknown
00:00:03.851539 File system of 'J:\virtualpc\testdrv2.vhd' is ntfs
00:00:03.852947 File system of 'G:\testing.vmdk' is ntfs
00:00:03.854151 File system of 'G:\encoding.vmdk' is ntfs
00:00:03.855359 File system of 'L:\virtualbox\debian_development jessy\debian_development_jessy.vmdk' is ntfs

Care to explain your setup here? I see that you still have the "VBoxGuestAdditions.iso'" mounted, you should unmount it when you're done installing the Guest Additions (GAs). I also see an assortment of VMDKs and VHDs. And three different drives, "G:\", "J:\" and "L:\". Internal/External? USB/NAS/SMB? USB2/3?

00:00:05.368448   VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/V_DRIVE="1"

This has a strong smell of a Vagrant (or similar) setup. Is that the case?

00:00:03.314088 Host RAM: 16351MB (15.9GB) total, 10512MB (10.2GB) available
00:00:05.368667 RamSize  <integer> = 0x0000000040000000 (1 073 741 824, 1 024 MB)
00:00:05.369041 VRamSize <integer> = 0x0000000001100000 (17 825 792, 17 MB)

1 GB of RAM and 17 MB of VRAM, for a VM that has the name "debian development jessy" doesn't sound very reassuring. You can most certainly afford to give your VM some more breathing room, like 4 GB of RAM and 128 MB of VRAM.

00:00:05.368766 [/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#0/Config/] (level 5)
00:00:05.368767   BlockCache <integer> = 0x0000000000000001 (1)

Go to the VM Settings » Storage » select your SATA controller » Use Host I/O Cache: enable that.

00:00:05.368663 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000004 (4)
00:00:06.725161 CPUM: Physical host cores: 4
00:00:06.725460 Full Name: "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz"

You have assigned all your CPUs to the VM. The host is going to run low on resources, since VirtualBox cares about physical processors (cores), not logical ones (threads). See "CPU Cores versus threads" and "Why is it a bad idea to allocate as many VCPUs as there are physical CPUs?".

Just check the link for your CPU above, and make sure you read the text in the "?" next to the "# of Cores" and "# of Threads" in that Intel page...

00:00:05.369053 [/GIM/] (level 1)
00:00:05.369053   Provider <string>  = "None" (cb=5)

Go to the VM Settings » System » Acceleration » Paravirtualization Interface: set it to "Default".

00:00:02.016004 [/USB/HidMouse/] (level 2)

I don't see something similar in your log. Go to the VM Settings » System » Motherboard » Pointing Device: set it to "USB Tablet".

That should do it for now...

[dfatvb]

It's finally sped up, I noticed when removing some header files it couldn't remove because of leftover files, I found some virtualbox extensions type files in there, so it appears that on one of the builds it did it against 4.x headers that were installed, but the kernel was 3.x. I install newer headers for building linux drivers on there, so the extensions compile should look to the kernel version in use. Anyway, I deleted them, the folder, installed newer 4.x files, try again and this time said building for my 3.x version. Now everything is back to normal speed. Must have been parts that were wrong before because shared folders was working.

[socratis]

I don't quite understood what you did there, but if it worked for you, I'll mark the thread as such as well, [WorksForMe].