great differences regarding boot time of Linux guests

[Volki]

Hi,

while I was playing around with Virtualbox 4.2.12 r84980, I noticed great differences as far as the boot times of the Linux guests are concerned.
Sometimes the boot time of a guest is around 1,5 mins, sometimes it lasts more than 5 mins. Certainly I have nothing changed in the middle.
I looked at the various log files (OS guest, OS host, VirtualBox), but I found nothing strange. To be honest, I really don't know what I have to look after.

Here is my configuration:

Host:
1*quad core 2,5 GHZ cpu => 8 virtual cpus
32 GB RAM
OEL 6.4
Virtualbox 4.2.12

2*Guests each having:
2 virtual cpus
8 GB RAM
guest os is OEL 6.4

The guests are separated on different SSDs. The host installation is on another disk.

If the boot time of the guest is around 5 mins, than the guest is somehow stuck afterwards. Even a simple ps -ef lasts around 30 secs.
If the boot time of the guest is fast, than the guest works with good performance thereafter.

Can you give me a hint where I can look at to get rid of this problem?

Thanks a lot for your efforts!

Regards
Volker

P.S. I tried a lot of different (reasonable???) virtualbox settings. Btw. when will Virtualbox support virtio for disks??

[Martin]

Are you running a single VM or both at the same time?

[Volki]

Hi Martin,

I am running both VMs at the same time. Meanwhile I found out that in case of a slow boot time both VMs are absolutely
CPU bound. Tomorrow I'll try to find out which processes eat up my VM cpus.

Regards
Volker

[Volki]

Hi,

it has absolutely nothing to do with the host CPUs. All are idle at approx. 65% while one VM is running. Nevertheless the VMs themselves are slow ;-(.
Swap isn't used at all.

Regards
Volker

[noteirak]

You try to compare two VMs booting, but the hardware on which they are located is not even the same.. Not really pertinent check to me.
What happens if you start VM only one at the time and check its booting time?
Or are they only slow when both are running at the same time?

[Volki]

Hi noteirak,
Both VMs are running in parallel. But booting is done one after another. Yesterday it lasted 40 mins to boot a single VM. The runqueue of the CPU showed numbers up to 45 for a single cpu VM.
The day before everything went fine and exactly this VM was up and running within 80 secs. On the host every time everything is fine. I played around with various VirtualBox settings, but I didn't get the
VM constantly booting in an acceptable time.

Regards
Volker

[Volki]

Hi again,

I forgot to say that I meanwhile checked my hardware. I.e. disks, cpu, ram, .... everything was/is fine.

Volker

[Perryg]

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

[ptevans01]

I have VirtualBox 4.2.18 and my reboot time before Ubuntu 13.10 was probably a little less than a minute. Now after i installed the 13.10 i can't reboot at all.