virtualbox.org

Host:
Windows 10 64 bit Version 1809 Build 17763.1577
Enterprise version
16 GB memory

Guest:
Ubuntu 10.10

VirtualBox 6.1.14

It used to work fairly well, after I upgraded to VBox 6.1.16, I had an issue where the automatic resize of the desktop did not work, I uninstalled, and reinstalled 6.1.14, and that problem went away, however now the performance of the guest OS is absolutely terrible. I do have the 6.1.14 guest additions installed in the guest, and the 6.1.14 host extensions installed.

CPU usage is generally 4-8%, with VBox being the highest user most of the time at 2% or so. Memory usage is around 40% and stable.

I have tried various combinations of display and 3d acceleration. The best one seems to be VBOXSVGA with no 3D acceleration. Enabling 3D acceleration makes my icons and menus for Ubuntu vanish.

Attached are both the VBox.log and VBoxHardening log.

Nothing seems wrong to my eyes in the logs. Your VM is flatlining a lot, but I don't see what is causing it.

Try a fresh brand-new VM with all of Virtualbox's chosen defaults (except for memory) with a new install of the OS, see what that VM does.

Giving 4GB to a 32bit guest seems a bit odd to me.

And it only uses 1 core (on a 6 core host), so it's going to lag.

I'd also wonder why the VM is using a VHD format drive, plus it uses an LSI SCSI controller, and the VHD doesn't have the same name as the VM. This VM was created in VMWare, right? And then seems to have gone through some kind of manual conversion process VMDK->VHD->create VM around it.

The slowness problem seems to be in the guest itself, not VirtualBox, which runs fine and itself complains about the guest slowness.

00:02:37.165314 VMMDev: vmmDevHeartbeatFlatlinedTimer: Guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received 4 seconds ago

It had been running absolutely fine up until I upgraded to virtual box 6.1.16, then downgraded back to 6.1.14 due to the problems with resizing the desktop in 6.1.16.

I don't honestly have a reasonable mechanism for recreating the VM, the person who set it all up is long gone from the company.

I can assign more cores, but that has never been an issue before. This is something that happened during the process of upgrading to 6.1.16 then going back to 6.1.14. I'd be happy to move to 6.1.16, but the options for desktop resolution available when I do that are not very attractive. The ability to turn on dynamic resizing goes away with the 6.1.16 guest additions.

I don't know what the VM was originally created in, it has gone through several transitions over the years, and I am not the person who worked on that originally.

It was running absolutely fine on my system in VBox 4.x, 5.x, 6.0.x, and 6.1.14. After I upgraded to 6.1.16, then downgraded back to 6.1.14 is when the problem started.

It looks like the update changed the execution cap to 1% on the VM. I changed that to 100, and set it to use 4 cores, and the problem is gone. Not sure how that got changed, but something in the updgrading/downgrading appears to have caused that.

This can be marked resolved.

rjrapier wrote:It looks like the update changed the execution cap to 1% on the VM.

This is a strange thing for an update to do, but it's a computer, anything is possible....

Glad you found out what was wrong!

rjrapier wrote:and set it to use 4 cores

Most people find that 2 cores is optimal for a VM. Beyond that it usually gets slower again.

mpack wrote:Most people find that 2 cores is optimal for a VM. Beyond that it usually gets slower again.

Thanks, will change that to 2.