virtualbox.org

Hey all,

I have been using VirtualBox on many different systems with a common setup: Windows 7 as Host, Ubuntu as Guest.

I have had speed issues in the past, and have heard various suggestions to resolve them (e.g. "Disable PAE/NX", "Disable VT-x", "Disable Nested Paging") and I have had various results toggling the different options. I would really like to maximize my system and was wondering if there is a recommended Benchmarking tool for my Ubuntu client that I can use to compare the various VirtualBox settings. For instance, I would: run the benchmarking tool natively and check out the results. Then I would disable PAE/NX and run it again and compare it to the original results. Then I would disable Nested paging and compare the results. Etc.

Does anyone know of a good tool I can use to do this? Thanks.

I don't know of any benchmarking tool that works satisfactorally in a VM. Typically they will produce nonsensical results, e.g. a guest that runs faster than the host.

Thanks for the response. Do you know of anyway I can test the speeds of the different options outside of just eyeballing it?

Also, if I run two benchmarks in the same VM with a different VM flag, would you expect an apples to apples comparison? I understand that it may not be valuable in an absolute sense, but I am looking to answer relative questions like "did performance increase when I unchecked VT-x?". Thanks.