Ubuntu client running slloooowwwly

[oranev]

For whatever reason Ubuntu Clients always run especially slow on my work computer...

I have a decent computer. Quad core 3.3 ghz and 16gb ram. I run XP virtual machines on it all the time without an issue. However when I installed Ubuntu, it dragged on slowly... I gave it about 3gb of ram and allowed it 4 CPUs. Still. When I click on the Ubuntu Icon & type 'terminal' it takes about 5 seconds for all of the letters to come out & the icon to appear.

Am I missing something? Should I change something?

[Perryg]

Post the guests log file (as an attachment)
See Online Users Manual for the location of the file.

[mpack]

Trying running it with 1 core. Certainly giving it all four does not bode well for the performance of the host, which includes all the host services which the VM relies on...

[oranev]

Trying running it with 1 core. Certainly giving it all four does not bode well for the performance of the host, which includes all the host services which the VM relies on...

I ran it with 1 core and it was even slower. I remember first running Ubuntu nearly a decade ago on a very weak laptop & it wasn't this bad. I'm wondering...

Post the guests log file (as an attachment)
See Online Users Manual for the location of the file.

I wish I knew what it meant. I don't but here it is. Thanks

[Perryg]

Post the results of the following from a guest terminal:

Code: Select all

glxinfo | grep OpenGL

[oranev]

Post the results of the following from a guest terminal:

Code: Select all

glxinfo | grep OpenGL

OpenGL vendor string: VMWare, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.2, 128 bits)
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 9.1.1
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.2
OpenGL extensions:

I wonder why it says VMware. I'm definitely using Virtualbox.

[Perryg]

It's not really vmware but it is a version of the vmware gallium video driver for software acceleration.
Enable 3D in the guest settings and see if when you run the same command it now says chromium, humper, which is the actual VirtualBox hook to the hardware, not software.

To explain more:
Ubuntu and others decided to do away with fallback mode and instead force users to use software rendering. It works but at a terrible expense. Not only is all video rendering done in RAM but if you look at your processor performance you will see a 30% hit to the processor. Not a good thing in a virtual environment.

[oranev]

It's not really vmware but it is a version of the vmware gallium video driver for software acceleration.
Enable 3D in the guest settings and see if when you run the same command it now says chromium, humper, which is the actual VirtualBox hook to the hardware, not software.

To explain more:
Ubuntu and others decided to do away with fallback mode and instead force users to use software rendering. It works but at a terrible expense. Not only is all video rendering done in RAM but if you look at your processor performance you will see a 30% hit to the processor. Not a good thing in a virtual environment.

It feels like a screenshot is in order. I checked off 3D acceleration, but it didn't make a difference in speed or the output of that command. Though the explanation makes perfect sense. I guess most people visualize headless servers, so they're pretty indifferent to graphics rendering.

[Perryg]

As you can see it does work. You may need to increase your vRam to 64MB though especially if you want to run in full screen. I need to check one more thing though and will post back later as soon as my production machine has finished compiling.

Ubuntu-13.04-3D.png (398.17 KiB) Viewed 2114 times

[Perryg]

Yup good thing I checked. My main version of VirtualBox is from the future and I recalled a problem with the released version, probably only affecting hosts with nVidia graphics but not sure about that.

I found that on a cold boot the VirtualBox drivers do not load on some guests as evident by the same vmware drivers. Log off and back on and see if the VBox drivers don't take. You should know right away by the extra speed but the command I sent will tell you for sure. As far as I can tell this is actually fixed in my future version and will be included in the next maintenance release.

[Perryg]

Oh and while the unity DT is appealing if you really want your full speed back you should look into adding the cinnamon DT that Ubuntu now supports. Fully customisable and has a good start at becoming one of the leading DTs around for desktop PCs.

Ubuntu13.04-cinnamon-DT.png (609.26 KiB) Viewed 2110 times

[oranev]

I want to agree with you, but it's not working. I increased it to 128 MB, then tried again at 64 MB. I rebooted, logged off & back in again. The only thing that remotely helps is adding more cores. But at 4 cores, my host CPU usage goes up to 70%-80% just opening Libre office and a few other apps (and it's still painfully sluggish). OpenGL gives the same output as before. Did I miss a super basic step somewhere before all of this?

I remember virtualizing earlier versions of Ubuntu on a much slower computer without an issue.

[oranev]

Oh and while the unity DT is appealing if you really want your full speed back you should look into adding the cinnamon DT that Ubuntu now supports. Fully customisable and has a good start at becoming one of the leading DTs around for desktop PCs.

Ubuntu13.04-cinnamon-DT.png

Agreed, Cinnamon looks pretty good and I'd certainly prefer to have some of my horsepower back. I'm not even such a fan of Unity (I preferred Gnome tbh).

[Perryg]

I promise you that the sluggishness is due to the software acceleration. I turn 3D off in my guest settings and see exactly what you are seeing.

Send a new log file with 3D enabled so I can see it.

Oh and I never give my guests more than 2 processors and for the most I use one. As you see there is an overhead when adding processors that they are trying to fix, but at this time is not worth doing.

In the mean time they surely are getting close to releasing the maintenance release that fixes all this.

[bulletmark]

In the mean time they surely are getting close to releasing the maintenance release that fixes all this.

Perry, just a friendly note that you said this same thing to me about this issue 6 months ago! See your last post viewtopic.php?f=3&t=53528.

VB 3D support for Ubuntu guests since 12.04 (i.e. April 2012) has been a painful experience. Just has not seemed a priority to get this working properly.