virtualbox.org

An earlier post discussed VB 4.2 being very slow with Windows. It's also very slow with Linux...

I have a Mid-2011 Mac mini running OS X "Lion". It has 8GB of RAM.

I downloaded and installed VB yesterday. Then I downloaded and installed Linux Mint 14 (64-bit) in a VM, using default settings.

Linux runs like molasses. (I also installed Win7 in a VM, and it runs fairly quickly.) It takes over a minute to boot up the VM!! Then it takes another minute to log in!!! As if that weren't bad enough, using the desktop is an exercise in futility: bringing up a menu or making a menu selection takes tens of seconds!!! WTF.

The desktop is completely **unusable**. It's like working in slo-mo.

I also installed Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac. The same Linux Mint in Parallels boots up in 15 seconds, and login also takes 15 seconds. The desktop is snappy. So this is NOT a Linux issue but a VB issue.

I created a new VM and again installed Linux Mint. This time, it's not slow. I didn't do anything differently. It would appear that VB is very cranky and unpredictable. Therefore, if you're having performance issues with VB, regardless of your guest OS, I would suggest recreating the VM and seeing what happens. Yes, I know, it's a lot of work and a massive inconvenience, but that's life in open source...<snicker>