virtualbox.org

Hi,

I'm running linux guest's in a windows 7 host and they seem to be have a ridiculous amount of CPU usage. Moving a window for example will boost the CPU up to 100%, from about 10% completely idle. Moving the mouse in the window can boost CPU usage to upwards of 40% sometimes.

I've tried running Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 11.10 as well as Mint 13 (MATE) [All 32 bit version]. Each of the systems has a 30GB HDD, 2 GB of RAM, up to 100MB of Video memory, 1CPU. The RAM usage sits at about 200-300MB of the 2GB for each of them, I have guest additions installed on all.

The host system is Windows 7, 64 bit, 2 x 1TB hard drives, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 2000 Video Card, Intel i7 860 (4 cores/8 threads) running VirtualBox 4.1.18r78631.

I've looked through the forums here but haven't been able to find anything at all which mentions this problem.

If anyone has encountered this and has some advice that would be great.

Please post the VM log file ("VBox.log" from VMs "Logs" subfolder) - as a zipped attachment please.

Here are the logs for Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 11.10 and Mint 13.

You would get better performance if you enabled hardware virtualization in your PC bios.

What would that do sorry? Also how would I go about that?

You shut your PC down and boot it. While it is in post you press a combination of keys to enter the bios. Look for the section that has hardware virtualization and enable it.

Look up your PC on google to find out how if you do not have your owners manual.

As for what it will give you? Much better performance and the ability to run 64-bit guests if you desire.

Thats worked great, thanks for your help! It also means I can enable more than one CPU for each VM which is making everything significantly faster.

Cheers

With every processor there is more overhead. So just remember to not go crazy with the processors. Usually 2 is the best count and depending on the actual work load 1 may even be better.