poor USB speed

[cacheflow]

I've been battling this for a couple of days and have come to the conclusion that vbox USB speed is so bad it is a non starter.

I have two devices I have been testing. One is my android phone using PDANET as a tether app on my windows guest and the other is an E-MU 0202 high performance USB audio adapter (input and output).

Both have very poor speed when run in my windows xp s3 vbox guest but work fine on the same machine in linux and in a native (dual boot) windows XP S3 so it is not the hardware.

My android phone will connect with either enhanced USB (USB 2.0) or old usb 1. In both cases, under vbox, I get exactly the same performance which when I measure the tether speed with speedtest.net is 1/3 what I get when in native windows XP mode.

My E-MU 0202 usb audio is only 2.O compatible and will only work when I enable enhanced usb for the guest. It is so slow that it is unusable as an audio device on my guest. With a spectrum analyzer display, it takes more then 5 seconds to display a single spectrum line where in native mode (linux or xp on the same machine) it displays 500 lines per seconds. making the USB port 2500 times slower then native mode. This is a non starter for me.

I have tried all the usual. I have my user name in vboxgroup, have loaded the extension pack, have enabled the enhanced USB 2.0, Can see all my USB devices on the guest window menu bar and can connect and disconnect at will. I have all the proper drivers installed on Windows.

I have been googleing vbox usb issues and this seems to be a long running problem for vbox. Has anyone else had a different or same experience?

It is a shame that USB performance is so slow on vbox as I find vbox native network, disk speed, display speed and mouse/keyboard speed as very acceptable. Since I use many USB devices on my system, the current version of the extension pack does not meet my usb performance needs.

Thanks,

cacheflow

[stefan.becker]

Dont expect native performance.

[vbox4me2]

Your best bet is to share the usb device from the Host, you then get Host/native speed to the Guest.

[cacheflow]

Sharing with the host sounds interesting. Do you have a link towards that approach? I will definitely do some research. As far as never as good as native, overhead for virtual machines should be on the order of a few percent and certainly not more then 20% and with a dedicated resource I don't see any reason for a performance hit at all. How do I know this stuff? I worked for Amazon on their virtual technology. I'm seeing 60% to 70% reduction from native for my Android and if you read my post you would see I got the same numbers for USB1 as I did with USB2 so there is definitely something wrong with the hooks for USB 2. Further, at 1/2500 performance on my E-MU 0202 usb audio adapter we are talking a 99.96% performance hit. Not what I would call realistic and definitely something wrong here.

Thanks,

cacheflow

[vbox4me2]

Not really, usb uses a controller that is not multitask/thread aware, unless you use a pci dedicated card with its own on-board controller you can push the system to a limit that hardly anything else will respond, on a system with nothing else todo this is not really a problem. A share however runs thru some software(OS) control so the OS can keep things more smoothly. Sharing is commonly done via Samba(linux) or simple file and print sharing(windows).

[jorgensen]

Have tested the USB speed with an USB harddisk and only gets 4MB with version 3 and nearly 5MB in version 4.
On the host the speed is above 20MB.

[cacheflow]

Not really, usb uses a controller that is not multitask/thread aware, unless you use a pci dedicated card with its own on-board controller you can push the system to a limit that hardly anything else will respond, on a system with nothing else todo this is not really a problem. A share however runs thru some software(OS) control so the OS can keep things more smoothly. Sharing is commonly done via Samba(linux) or simple file and print sharing(windows).

Your share approach is very useful for a disk drive or other block structure device, however, the EMU 0202 is a high performance audio interface that uses USB 2.0 as its connection. It requires reasonable performance to move sampe rates upto to 200KHz (by 16) and the current USB configuration doesn't even come close to keeping up.

There may be a way to map high performance audio through alsa and connect alsa to the windows sound management tools but I have not found how to do that yet.

If anyone has had success connecting a non block structured (no disk/sd/cd/dvd) device to USB 2.0 that requires high throughput, please contact me as you may have some magic that I would like to know!

[Nessuno]

Your best bet is to share the usb device from the Host, you then get Host/native speed to the Guest.

This could be a solution only if the external device is a shareable resource and, in case of an external disk, the file system is readable by the host, but people sometimes use virtual machines just to access "foreign" filesystems (e.g. extfs on OSX)...

Edit: But maybe this argument is not so relevant in the "Win Guest" forum... sorry

[banusz.andras]

I am having the exact same issue here. Ubuntu Linux as host, Windows XP as guest, and trying to make my EMU 0202 work in XP, but all I get is random cracks and pops while playing an mp3, and what seems to be a very sluggish media player, that hangs for seconds.

I'm in the vboxusers group, installed the extension pack, enabled EHCI, installed guest additions, installed EMU driver from the original CD.

The only thing I can't do in Linux is use the "Guitar Rig" software, don't tell me I have to install windows and dual boot for 1 stupid program...

[stefan.becker]

It is as it is.

With a USB HD i get only 30% of native performance.

So use Dual Boot or use linux software.

[danny0085]

Here you can review a good collection of linux software .

[UnMinou]

I had some serious speed issues with USB in Windows XP under Virtual Box. It used to work fine until I updated the system and Gnome 3 replaced my good old Gnome 2.
I hated that garbage so much that I switched to KDE. I had some work to do with IAR AVR32 debugger and discovered that what used to be a second or less for single steps almost turned into minutes(s) when the debugger didn't just time out or IAR had problems reading the USB dongle.
My Linux system is gentoo. I thought that the system was hozed and didn't feel like reinstalling at this time so I installed Centos 6.0 on another partition. I found that my IAR debugger worked perfectly there, they still have gnome 2. Centos is good but it doesn't have much of the new stuff.
A few days later I went back to gentoo and did a test. I installed XFCE and switched from KDE. Problem solved. The issue was not gentoo but KDE which is hog of resources. Just to load a console can take close to a minutes with that stupid icon flashing, kind of like the ridiculous hourglass on windows. The only issue with xfce so far is that it doesn't have my French Canadian keyboard, it's got all the Canadian keyboards I would never use. I will have to find another interface that is fast but one that supports my keyboard. KDE and gnome 3 are off my list forever.