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Mavericks slow when Virtualbox running Ubuntu guest

Posted: 18. Nov 2013, 17:52
by chemdream
My mavericks is fast until I start an Ubuntu guest.

I have 8gigs of memory, I load ONLY the Ubuntu guest with a limit of 1.5gigs of memory and 2 cores (I have 8). Suddenly my system is crawling. My processor is a sandy bridge i7.

I am at the latest Vbox and guest additions.

On mountain lion, virtualbox seemed to have little to no affect on system performance. The only difference in my system is it is Mavericks instead of Mountain Lion.

Thanks!!

Re: Mavericks slow when Virtualbox running Ubuntu guest

Posted: 19. Nov 2013, 09:27
by socratis
chemdream wrote:Ubuntu guest with a limit of 1.5gigs of memory and 2 cores (I have 8 ). Suddenly my system is crawling
What is your activity monitor showing? Is there a process that is using too much CPU/Memory/HD_activity? What does your free HD space looks like? What are the specs on your Guest? I'm not sitting in front of your computer, so if you need help with this you'll have to provide more analytical information. Think of it as you're describing your issue to a blind and deaf person.

Re: Mavericks slow when Virtualbox running Ubuntu guest

Posted: 19. Nov 2013, 16:17
by chemdream
It's not CPU. I have over 100gigs free on my drive and only 20% used within the guest. The specs on the guest are really light. 20gb drive, 2 cores (out of my 8), 1.5gb memory. It's just a simple Ubuntu slice for apache. So it's usually not doing anything. top shows it hovering around .01% CPU usage, even when the rest of my system is running slow.

Memory is completely maxed out though. 7.98gigs used out of 8 gigs. But this is actually normal for Mavericks because of the compressed memory. The memory pressure is really light.

About the memory, even when I have a 4gigs of memory free, the computer still is really slow when running ubuntu guest.

Re: Mavericks slow when Virtualbox running Ubuntu guest

Posted: 19. Nov 2013, 16:51
by mpack

Re: Mavericks slow when Virtualbox running Ubuntu guest

Posted: 19. Nov 2013, 20:02
by rpmurray
In past versions of VB there have been performance issues when allocating more than one core to a VM (at least on OS X hosts). Have you tried using just a single core for the VM?

Re: Mavericks slow when Virtualbox running Ubuntu guest

Posted: 22. Nov 2013, 01:24
by markbrown4
I've noticed Ubuntu taking ages to respond to web requests in Mavericks, simply focusing on the VirtualBox window brings it back to life.
I attribute the performance problems to one of the new power saving features ion Mavericks - AppNap. Not sure if an update can prevent it.

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