Slow CentOS client on Mac Host

[sgbotsford]

Host: Hackintosh two core 2.66 GHz, 64 bit, 8 GB Ram, Nvidia GeForce 9600 video. 512 MB vid running Snow Leopard.
Disk 500 GB Baracuda 7200 RPM on Intel IHCR

VB version is 3.2.10

Client: Linux CentOS Build 2.6.18-194.e15 64 bit kernel. 2 GB ram. Disk 8 GB Static. 64 MB video 3D accel enabled.
Extra boot option "divider=10"

Client is quite slow. Normally if booting in verbose mode, most messages go past too fast to read. That is not a problem.
While I'm writing this it's been booting. 4:28 to boot to level 3 and get a login prompt. (4.5 minutes)

Thought 1. VB on the Hackintosh comes up in Analyzer as a 32 bit application. This version of CentOS is 64 bit.
If this is a bad idea, I'm open to recommendations for a lightweight linux distribution.

Thought 2. VB log has line:
00:02:42.251 AIOMgr: Host limits number of active IO requests to 16. Expect a performance impact.

Running sysctl on the host gives
kern.aiomax = 90
kern.aioprocmax = 16
kern.aiothreads = 4

I bumped up kern.aioprocmax to 64, quit & restarted VB, rebooted the linux client. No difference in speed. Message from AIOMgr now s/16/64

Ideas?

I can attach a sample log if you wish.




What else?

[fixedwheel]

Client: Linux CentOS Build 2.6.18-194.e15 64 bit kernel. 2 GB ram. (...)

Thought 1. VB on the Hackintosh comes up in Analyzer as a 32 bit application. This version of CentOS is 64 bit.
If this is a bad idea, I'm open to recommendations for a lightweight linux distribution.

Since supporting 64 bits on 32-bit hosts incurs additional overhead, VirtualBox only enables this support upon explicit request.

As you give only 2GB RAM, why 64bit anyway? - the 32bit CentOS variant will handle 2GB as well

CentOS/RHEL 5 booting is lame, but you can probably gain some performance by completely disabeling SELinux (inclusive setting selinux=0 kernel parm) and by not installing on LVM volumes (IMHO quite senseless in virtual environment, on virtual harddisk), instead install into bare partition inside the VDI.

what do you expect from "lightweight distribution", what requirements do you have?

2.6.18-194.e15 64 bit kernel. (...) 64 MB video 3D accel enabled.

2.6.18 is too old for 3D and 64MB video is probably far too much (i guess 24MB would be enough for 1920x1200)

[sgbotsford]

The 64 bit CentOS version was because I had it. My link to the world runs no faster than (and frequently slower than) 24 MB/Hour, so downloading a new OS is not done casually. The previous installation of linux was Fedora 9, for which I no longer have images.

However, I don't think that that is the issue.

I did get a new copy of Puppy Linux downloaded. It takes 10 minutes to boot off of a virtual CD.
(Chosen because of a claim to have reasonable performance on elderly hardware.) I gave it a GB of ram, and have not otherwise tinkered with default settings.

I'm in the process of testing a switch over from Linux to Mac. I have considerable photos cataloged in digikam. I do web development using a mix of vi + markdown + template toolkit, all of which will run on Mac if I beat them over the head. I run apache on linux to mirror my server environment for testing web pages. I don't need an extremely capable linux distribution.

[fixedwheel]

I run apache on linux to mirror my server environment for testing web pages.

i would go with the same distribution thats running on the mirrored server, just my 0,02ct

[sgbotsford]

While installing RedHat Enterprise Server is a thought, in my experience it would be more appropraite to be sure to match apache versions.

Anyway, wandering away from the topic. As I mentioned before, even I installed puppy linux in another virtual machine. It takes 5 minutes to boot. I'm starting to think that Snow Leopard is not a good host environment for VB

[fixedwheel]

ok, looks like a host issue

anyway:

While installing RedHat Enterprise Server is a thought,

CentOS is a good and compatible replacement when support by Red Hat subscription is not needed