VBox 3.0.4 Shared folders very slow

[mpack]

I upgraded from VBox 2.1.4 to 3.0.4 a few days ago. Everything appears to be fine, except I notice that accessing files inside VBox Shared Folders has gotten very slow. If anyone is familiar with the freeware Notepad++ utility, it takes several seconds to finish loading a text file of only a few K. I mention that particular utility because, confusingly, it then seemed to be slowed down permanently (including for files read off the HDD) after my first shared folder access... until I realised that it was due to the Notepad++ feature of opening up all recent files under a number of tabs, hence it was repeating the shared folder access.

Let's face it, VBox shared folders were never lightning fast, but things seem to have gotten a lot worse. I thought it might be due to conflicts with networked shared folders so I set the VMs network type to "Not connected" - but that made no noticeable difference.

Has anyone else noticed this? A google search for slow shared folders shows discussions from back in 2007, I couldn't find anything recent.

[sandervl]

See http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1728

[mpack]

Thanks sandervl - however I must admit I find that ticket quite hard to read. They seem to be talking about a wide variety of VBox versions that I was relatively happy with. It's only with 3.0.4 that I've noticed something odd happening. I don't see anything in the ticket that acknowledges a particular problem in 3.0.4.

[sandervl]

The ticket is a bit old, but contains some hints about WebDAV slowing things down.
If this applies to your problem (http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4728), then you can add a comment there.

By the way, I assume you're using the 3.0.4 additions in the VM too. If not, then try updating them.

[mpack]

By the way, I assume you're using the 3.0.4 additions in the VM too. If not, then try updating them.

I wasn't sure if I'd remembered the additions or not, so I reinstalled them anyway prior to my first message. It made no difference.

I'll check the other stuff you mentioned.

[mpack]

Ok, I tried disabling the "WebClient" and "TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper" services in my XP VM, and it may have made a difference, I'm not altogether sure. Performance is still quite slow. I'm having trouble seeing why this explanation would only be a problem in v3.0.4 though. I've noticed as well that if I open the text file, close it, then immediately reopen it then the second load is snappy enough. However if I wait a few seconds before the second load then there's a long pause before the file pops up. Some sort of time limited cacheing?

There is also another odd change in behaviour that I forgot to mention. I have a VBox shared folder called "Shared". If I open the "My Network Places" branch in Explorer then I see a new branch added: "VBOXSVRShared on VirtualBox Shared Folders", which is there in addition to the location I used to find it in, ie. "\My Network Places\Entire Network\VirtualBox Shared Folders \\VBOXSVR\Shared". I'm pretty sure this didn't use to happen in v2.1.4 (the version I was using before the upgrade). AFAIK I changed nothing in the VM that might be causing this, though I have recently been experimenting with enabling network shares on the host. Unfortunately upgrading to v3.0.4 updated all my VM settings XMLs, so I'm not keen to attempt reverting to 2.1.4 (I do keep a backup, unfortunately I refreshed this backup after installing 3.0.4 and quickly verifying that my VMs still worked).

On the second ticket: the details are different, but it does sound similar to mine. I suspect the "weird" bit he refers to happens if he makes any change that causes Windows to access the shared folder again.