How to Optimize VM performance (8GB RAM, i5-2540M CPU @ 2.6)

[Zack52]

Host Machine...
Windows 7 Professional
Processor Intel Core i5-2540M CPU @ 2.60 GHz
RAM 8.00GB
64-bit OS

I've been working on a project for a few weeks now and the VM has recently slowed down drastically. It's essentially unworkable, and I'm looking for an effective solution to improve the performance speed.

Any suggestions? Let me know if you need more details to address the situation.

Thanks

[Zack52]

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04.1 with about 6MB base memory, 1CPU, 100% execution cap, 64 MB video memory, 25fps/medium quality.

[Perryg]

Post the guests log file ( as an attachment )

[Zack52]

Not exactly sure what the guest log file is, but does this help?

[Zack52]

Oh here we go.

[Perryg]

Code: Select all

00:00:03.355458   Name            <string>  = "Ubuntu 14.04.1 w Drupal Commons - BUILD" (cb=40)
00:00:03.355463   NumCPUs         <integer> = 0x0000000000000004 (4)

Code: Select all

00:00:04.196929 Logical host processors: 4 present, 4 max, 4 online, online mask: 000000000000000f
00:00:04.198494 Physical host cores: 2

http://ark.intel.com/products/50072/Int ... o-3_30-GHz

You are over committing your processor. VirtualBox deals with cores only and not threads. I am fairly sure it shows an error in the settings section about this. Using more will cause a degradation of the guest and not an improvement.

Make sure you have EPT enabled and set the guest to use large pages. (see VBoxManage modifyvm in your user manual)

[mpack]

IMHO, this guest should not be given more than 1 core on this host.

Also, does Ubuntu (even 64bit) really need 5GB RAM? That big block of locked memory on the host certainly won't improve performance.

That said, the log shows the VM booting to the desktop inside of a minute, which IMHO is pretty good for 64-bit Windows. Perhaps you should look to anti-virus, network etc running in the guest for the CPU or I/O hogs, rather than assuming it's a VBox problem.

This log shows the VM being booted from scratch. That's good, as some people use saved state forever, so there's never a time when all the crud gets cleaned out of memory. In that case a continually deteriorating performance would be no big surprise.