50% CPU load on host when guest iddle

[karailiev]

Hello all.
A saw few similar posts, but they were about older VB releases and/or the proposed solutions didn't help.
What I have is:
Win Vista host with 2 core CPU
Two guests with Win XP, created with VM Ware.
After I migrated to VirtualBox one of the guests is working fine. When I start the second one, it loads really slow - it needs about 10 minutes to start all services, while on VM Ware it nedded abot 2 minutes. After loading all services the CPU load is about 4-7%, but the host still shows 50%.
I tried to set the affinity to just one CPU core, but the result is that this core is working on 100% and the second is iddle, so the end result is again 50% load.

Note: The first guest (well working) didn't want to start in VisrtualBox until I remove the agp440 driver.
The second one had no problems with it, so I didn't remove it. Is it possible this is the problem?

[stefan.becker]

At the moment there is only one problem: No infos.

Post exact details about hardware and guest configurations.

[Sasquatch]

This has been discussed before. Currently, the v3 beta should have a fix for it. A work around with older versions of VB is to start a second VM. It can be anything, even a dummy one you pause at the boot splash. This is a problem with Windows Guests. Linux Guests usually don't have this. It also depends on the Host, because I see the behaviour on one of my two Hosts, with the same VM.

[karailiev]

Hello all
Thank you for your quick replies.

@stefan.becker: here is more info about the hostsystem:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64bit, 6000+, 3.11GHz
RAM: 2x2GB Corsairs
MB: Asus M2NPV-MX
VC: Gigabyte GeForce 8600 GT
HDD: Seagate 400GB
OS: Win Vista Ultimate 64bit

Guest:
RAM: 1024MB
HDD: 30GB vmdk, created with easyvmx.com and used with VM Ware Player and VM Ware Workstation 6.5.2
Network: bridged
Video: 128MB
3D: on
APIC: on
IO APIC: on
OS: Win XP Pro SP3


@Sasquatch:
How stable is the v3 beta?
I've started the both VMs I have and there was no difference. After they both load and stay iddle the host's CPU load is still 50-55%.

[Sasquatch]

I can't say how stable it is, you have to find that out for yourself. I've seen with other versions that some users have major stability issues, while I had no problems at all. And I don't run v3 beta yet, as I need some things and can't afford to have an unstable system.

[stefan.becker]

I thought yo have not enough RAM. But thats OK.

[Sasquatch]

RAM is not the cause of the CPU abuse on the Host. It doesn't matter if I give my XP VM 512 MB (now), 128 MB or 2 GB, it will still abuse one core.