Windows Vista host runs extremely slow, guest runs quickly

nic.dws · Post by **nic.dws** » 14. Oct 2008, 14:15

I am running Virtual Box on a Windows Vista Ultimate x64 host and no matter what OS I virtualise, I keep finding that my host system performs extremely slow while the guest (virtualised) OS runs quickly.

To give an example of what I mean, lets say that I launch Wordpad without running VirtualBox, it might take 1 second to appear. Now I launch a virtual machine running any OS using VirtualBox. Now I launch Wordpad again on my Vista host OS, I find that Wordpad could take 30 seconds to load. Yet if I were to launch it on the guest OS it would display in 1 second.

It seems that the host becomes bogged down while the guess (which ironically is running on top of the host) runs pretty quickly, much quicker than the host.

I was thinking that this might be an issue with Vista how it caches RAM rather than leaving it unallocated? Perhaps VirtualBox when VirtualBox allocates it's memory it fragments memory availble to the host OS? (wild guess, probably wrong)

I don't think the bottleneck would be on the CPU because the gues OS runs quickly.

Initially I was using 2GB of RAM so I upgraded to 4GB of RAM hoping that it would solve the problem but still no luck.

My hardware is:
- ASUS F3Jm laptop
- Core 2 Duo 2Ghz (4 MB cache + hardware virtualisation)
- 4GB DDR2 667mhz RAM
- Windows Vista Ultimate x64 (SP1)
- 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 7600 Go

The Vista host OS is completely patched, drivers are up to date and I am using the latest VirtualBox release.

I've tried allocating different amounts of RAM such as 512MB and 2048MB, I find that 512MB seems to perform ok, but I am really wanting to allocate 2048MB of RAM to the virtualised OS (thats the entire reason that I upgraded to 4GB in the first place).

I want to actually be able to do serious work on the virtualised guest OS (hence why I want to allocate 2GB to it).

I've searched both Google and this board and I can't find a thread that matches my problem.

Thanks for any help...

winop · Post by **winop** » 15. Oct 2008, 03:14

I am using virtualbox in windows server 2008 x64 edition too,
I had meet the same problem with you .
My virtualbox version is For AMD64 , is the matter cause this problem?

nic.dws · Post by **nic.dws** » 15. Oct 2008, 04:54

That's a good question actually because I am also running the x64 build.

I did also try Virtual PC (x64) today and I noticed the exact same slowdown effect... my system seems to slow down to a crawl while the Virtual OS remains fast and responsive.

I haven't thought of trying the 32-bit version is because I thought that the application also installs networking drivers, which don't work on Windows x64. Regardless I might try the 32-bit variations of each program and see what happens (although I suspect that this is down to the way that Vista manages it's memory).

Will report on my results.

gstark45 · Post by **gstark45** » 15. Oct 2008, 05:05

Have the same basic configuration as everyone here, and my host slows to a crawl, but, even after closing the vm, continues to be basically unresponsive...My suspicion is that vbox isn't releasing the memory completely, but not sure. Based upon what I've read here, it seems to be something consistant, so does any have any technical thoughts on how to address it?

gstark45 · Post by **gstark45** » 15. Oct 2008, 05:05

Have the same basic configuration as everyone here, and my host slows to a crawl, but, even after closing the vm, continues to be basically unresponsive...My suspicion is that vbox isn't releasing the memory completely, but not sure. Based upon what I've read here, it seems to be something consistant, so does any have any technical thoughts on how to address it?

winop · Post by **winop** » 15. Oct 2008, 05:29

nic.dws wrote:That's a good question actually because I am also running the x64 build.

I did also try Virtual PC (x64) today and I noticed the exact same slowdown effect... my system seems to slow down to a crawl while the Virtual OS remains fast and responsive.

I haven't thought of trying the 32-bit version is because I thought that the application also installs networking drivers, which don't work on Windows x64. Regardless I might try the 32-bit variations of each program and see what happens (although I suspect that this is down to the way that Vista manages it's memory).

Will report on my results.

Thank you for you test.
I will follow this topic to find the reason of crawl.

BTW:My English is not very good. I am come from China.

Post by **TerryE** » 15. Oct 2008, 13:32

Hi. This seems to be a systemic issue, but not one that I can help with since I won't touch Vista -- too many probs. However the reason for my post is to suggest that one of you use the public Bugtracker to raise a ticket on this issue. You will first need to register for a wiki user account (this is different to a forum account sorry).

nic.dws · Post by **nic.dws** » 16. Oct 2008, 05:44

Last night I installed Windows Server 2008 x64 with VirtualBox x64 and to my surprise it all seemed to run at a very respectable speed.

When I installed it I did not configure Windows Search or SuperFetch.

I have a strong feeling that SuperFetch might be the culprit because from what I know it loads commonly used applications into memory so that they launch quicker.

Perhaps is SuperFetch is taking up lots of RAM and when the Virtual PC comes along it fragments the memory that SuperFetch is using.

I am going to turn SuperFetch off tonight on my Vista install and see if it makes a difference.

meld51 · Post by **meld51** » 18. Oct 2008, 11:16

From my experience of running XP and Ubuntu in Vista the problem gets worse and worse over a hour or so until the host becomes completely unusable. Its as if all the memory is taken and the Host develops a massive swap file.

The only way out sometimes is to grit your teeth and switch off right in the middle of things.

This appears to occur even when VB is running but with no OS yet started.

I'll read up on Bugtracker.

meld51 · Post by **meld51** » 18. Oct 2008, 11:28

Just looked at Bugtracker.

Ticket http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2212 discusses this...

However the download that is supposed to be a fix for this is an empty zip file. Has the fix been removed from the ticket? Reading other people's remarks it seems the fix works...but for me there is nothing to extract?

Post by **Sasquatch** » 18. Oct 2008, 16:35

meld51 wrote:Just looked at Bugtracker.

Ticket http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2212 discusses this...

However the download that is supposed to be a fix for this is an empty zip file. Has the fix been removed from the ticket? Reading other people's remarks it seems the fix works...but for me there is nothing to extract?

With which browser did you download the file? There have been reports that MS IE doesn't work properly but Firefox or any other browser gave no problems.

Do you have any antivirus running that might interfere?

meld51 · Post by **meld51** » 19. Oct 2008, 10:30

I used IE 7 in the host. I have downloaded literally hundreds of files and fixes and never had a problem before.

I can try Firefox I suppose...

I'll update you on the result...

virtualbox.org

Windows Vista host runs extremely slow, guest runs quickly

Windows Vista host runs extremely slow, guest runs quickly

same here as well

same here as well