virtualbox.org

I've been running a very old VB version with an old centos/asterisk combination and I recently upgraded everything, latest VB running on CentOS 6.3 host with latest CentOS+asterisk as guest. The VB is also running 5-6 winXP and win7 guests as well.

The problem appeared instatnly, the guest CentOS+asterisk would crawl, SIP VoIP calls would have audio issues and the asterisk process would constantly run at 40% cpu usage.

After trying just about everything, I solved the problem by accident: I changed the CPUs from 1 to 2 and also enabled IO-APIC.

I have no idea why, but suddenly the asterisk process is running at 0-2% cpu usage, all phone calls work great with crystal-clear audio.

Anyone can explain what happened please? Is this a bug in VB or something else?


PS:
the winXP and win7 guests are all running with 1 CPU and don't have any cpu usage problems!

Suppose you leave the number of CPUs at 1 and have enabling of IO APIC as your only change?

Bug in VB? Not necessarily. All PCs made in the last decade have included an IO APIC, hence modern guest OS's are increasingly assuming one will be present, and code to run on alternative is not heavily tested. Obviously XP was designed to run on older PCs, and Win7 inherits much code from it.

Hello,

Sorry to re-open an old thread but it is related...

How much RAM did you use for the guest?

Are you able to break it down to RAM / CPU per (10) line(s) or do you just give it more just as you need?

Thanks in advance,
Robsablah