Program slower through guestcontrol than running live

[tomhollis]

Hi,

I am having problems with running programs using VBoxManage guestcontrol, I have the system all up and running and am very pleased with it. However it seems that if I run a program using the VBox CLI it runs many times slower than if I simply run the command on the virtual machine. I have searched around and can't find any similar problems.

My host machine is ubuntu.
My virtual machine is winxp with about 600Mb of my host machines 2Gb of RAM.
I am using virtualbox 4.0.4 with the same version of guest additions.

I have a bash script which I am running in cygwin on the winxp VM which builds some code using visual studio. This runs at a very respectable speed when I run it on the VM in the normal way, however when I run it using the VBox CLI it takes over a minute to compile a single C file.

Looking at system monitors there is plenty of memory spare on both host and VM.

The processor usage is quite different though. When running from the VM the compiler is the highest user of the processor, when running from the Vbox CLI the VBoxService.exe process sits at over 95% so nothing gets done.

Has anyone had a similar problem? I can't see that I am doing anything very different, it seems like the host is checking the VM too often, is there a way of reducing the time checks?
My command line looks like:

VBoxManage guestcontrol exec winxp "C:\\cygwin\\bin\\mintty.exe" --environment WORKROOT="T:\\tools" --username tools --password secret --arguments "-e /cygdrive/s/win_build_and_doc.sh internal"
(the given user is logged in so I can see what happens)

Thanks for any help

Tom

[tomhollis]

Well, I don't have a solution but it seems there is a bug reported about this:

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7872

Tom