VB 4.2 *very slow* after installing the tools?

[stevemaser]

I have a Windows 7 (really old) VM and a Windows 8 Enterprise RTM (clean install) VM -- both 32 bit. (And I have another Windows 8 64-bit Enterprise RTM clean install on another machine))

After upgrading to VB 4.2 -- the VMs were as responsive as normal.

As soon as I installed the 4.2 tools -- the performance of the VMs dropped dramatically.

Uninstalling the 4.2 tools -- things were back and snappy as usual.

This is on a Mac running the release build of 10.8.2

Is there something I can submit that might help the developers track this down?

Or are others seeing this behavior?

[stevemaser]

Nobody else seeing this?

I'm wondering if this is just a Windows thing.

I uninstalled the tools, uninstalled VB, rebooted my mac, reinstalled VB and the tools and I see this:

Immediate log in after restart and immediately run Excel from the Metro icon -- it takes about 40-50 seconds for it to switch to the Desktop (which is quick) and for Excel to load.


But if I restart Windows 8 and log in -- and then let it sit for a number of minutes -- then Excel will launch in about 10-15 seconds from the Metro desktop.

[starlocke]

You aren't alone.

I'm on a Retina MacBook Pro, running Mountain Lion.

Upgraded to VirtualBox 4.2.0; installed new guest additions for my Xubuntu 12.04 VM...

The world has ended -- everything in VM has slowed down, drastically -- this is most prominent with keyboard and mouse actions -- firing up Chrome (in the VM) and trying to scroll down a web page became unacceptably hard, command line terminal is no longer snappy and fast to type inside of, editing code is harder in geany: double-clicking on a word to select it is especially hard suddenly (triple-quadruple click is my workaround for now).

It's not like the CPU is getting hit hard, but something is seriously slowing down processing all over the place.

[starlocke]

A tiny bit of relief is that rolling back to VirtualBox 4.1.23 was a relatively painless process.

- Shut down all VMs -- do not use "Save current State" mode
- Quit VirtualBox
- Install VB 4.1.23
- Launch VirtualBox and/or VirtualBoxVMs -- didn't even have to bother rolling back the "guest additions" (your mileage may vary on the guest additions)

[stevemaser]

So after I posted this (and maybe the 4.2.1 build has some improvements?), I found that if I logged into Windows 8 -- and then let it sit for a few minutes, doing things like launching Excel were very quick.

So, either Windows 8 caches something, the 4.2.1 builds fixed something, or I just need to give Windows 8 more time to set itself up after login before trying to actually use it...

[michaln]

Windows likes to index disks and perform various housekeeping tasks in the background, especially when freshly installed. It's entirely possible that simply waiting until it was done was all it took. Unfortunately the highly disk intensive tasks simply cause a lot of I/O load on the host and take some time to complete, which is just a fact of life.

We're not aware of any change relevant to this in the 4.2.1 build.

[Mandu]

I'm experiencing something similar (see viewtopic.php?f=8&t=51704). I installed VB 4.2.1 (which Check For Updates somehow misses; have to go to site to get it). Didn't install extras. Booting Mint and Ubuntu are crazy slow under 10.8.2. OSX uses 102% CPU (one full core plus a little) for 15 minutes, then settles back to 30% while the guest OS is doing essentially nothing. It's not really until this point that the system becomes useable. Something has definitely changed with 10.8.2.

[shortee]

Possible related retina issue...
My system is a MacBook Pro Retina with an attached 21 inch monitor, running OSX 10.8.2 and VirtualBox 4.2.1. The guest is WinXP with the tools installed.
With the guest on the retina display, dragging windows is very sluggish. I tried turning off "show contents when dragging", but it didn't help. If I drag the guest onto a non-retina display, it works quickly. If I drag it back to retina and it slows down again.
I suspect the sluggishness is due to the over sampling done to map the low resolution guest display onto the high resolution host display. I hope this helps..

[splpav]

Possible related retina issue...
My system is a MacBook Pro Retina with an attached 21 inch monitor, running OSX 10.8.2 and VirtualBox 4.2.1. The guest is WinXP with the tools installed.
With the guest on the retina display, dragging windows is very sluggish. I tried turning off "show contents when dragging", but it didn't help. If I drag the guest onto a non-retina display, it works quickly. If I drag it back to retina and it slows down again.
I suspect the sluggishness is due to the over sampling done to map the low resolution guest display onto the high resolution host display. I hope this helps..

Bumping an old thread.

I am having the same problem as above. Tried updating to 4.2.6 but still having the issue. Working fine on external monitors just not on the retina display. Anyone know of a fix for this problem?

Thanks!

[suspendedrain]

I'm seeing the same problem. My Windows 7 vm works fine on my older mbp 17", but window dragging/scrolling is very sluggish on my mbp retina running mountain lion. VERY SLUGGISH: I can click a window then swirl it around in a circle twice (about 1 sec of dragging). The mouse cursor tracks fine and completes the movement as expected in my 1 sec movement. The window, however, lags behind and will continue to follow my original path, but it will take upwards of 6 seconds to complete. It appears to be a gpu issue. General processing appears to be fine; applications are very responsive. I just notice this on window drags and scrolling window drags.

[splpav]

Yep still happening with me, but can't find a solution anywhere. Sigh.

[Indra]

I've the same issue, 16 GB of RAM and I7 260k CPU - installed VB 4.2.6 and created two VM's (Server 2012) and both the Vm's are really SLOW!! I think it has to do with 10.8.2 i never had issues in 10.7 though.

Any help would be helpful, if this continues i need to go back to hyper-v.

[mrg314]

Have similar issue. I noticed that it seems to be a display update issue, since if I used seamless mode and clicked outside of VB, the display would update and I could see that in fact it was working just as fast as normal, but I just couldn't see it. Same thing in full screen mode. However, I just updated to 4.2.8 and all problems solved !

[dragoff]

Thats how I got around similar problem in version 4.2.16 to run win7 guest on mac osx 10.8.4 host:

In Settings, Storage, Controller IDE - changed "Type" from default setting to ICH6, option "Use host I/O cache" - unchecked
In Settings, Storage, Controller IDE - option "Use host I/O cache" - unchecked
In Settings, System, Acceleration - option "enable nested paging" - unchecked

[michaln]

Thats how I got around similar problem in version 4.2.16 to run win7 guest on mac osx 10.8.4 host:

In Settings, Storage, Controller IDE - changed "Type" from default setting to ICH6, option "Use host I/O cache" - unchecked
In Settings, Storage, Controller IDE - option "Use host I/O cache" - unchecked
In Settings, System, Acceleration - option "enable nested paging" - unchecked

This is total nonsense.

Disabling nested paging (if host supports it) will always slow down the VM. Changing the IDE controller type from PIIX4 to ICH6 has zero impact on performance. Disabling the host I/O cache will also slow down the VM, although it may be beneficial for overall system throughput (depends on many variables).