[Solved] Windows 7 32bit Guest slow after Yosemite upgrade

[loukingjr]

Me too!

I've tried repairing disk permissions (no major issues found, and certainly none relating to Virtualbox or any VM), and I also checked the integrity of the disk after (Verify disk) just in case. No problems there. After restarting, the VM is still sluggish. Will try your suggestion about the Drag n Drop and let you know.

I will be able to install a new guest to check, but that will be a last resort - I want to eliminate all other causes first! (Though it's looking more likely that I'll have to do this.)

[EDIT: Drag n drop and PAE made no difference]

As far as another install, I'm just thinking perhaps the guest itself was corrupted when you updated to Yosemite. So if a second install works…

[SpacemanSpiff]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking - although that doesn't explain the apparent fix of the issue yesterday.

In the meantime, I've tried one or two other things to try absolutely everything before the reinstall.

Previously, I'd uninstalled 4.3.18, reinstalled the 4.3.16, then reinstalled 4.3.18. After this it seemed to work. I basically repeated the process but to no avail.

Following on from this, it worked when I got in the following morning from this reinstall. Normally I'm one of the first in, and therefore my computer is one of the first on. However, this morning I was late in and my computer was the last on in the building (there's about 20 machines total) and it was sluggish again. Therefore I was wondering if this was a router-related issue, so I've just dropped out the router from our network and tried it using a (dumb) network switch only. It was still the same then, but it'll be interesting to see if it works tomorrow morning when I'm in at normal time.

Following on from this, I'm all done on anything I can think of that might be causing the issue. My final test will be to create a new VM from scratch (unfortunately this will have to wait until next week) and see if it exists in the new VM. If it doesn't, then the VM must be corrupted; if it does, is it worth reporting this as a bug to the dev team?

[loukingjr]

Following on from this, I'm all done on anything I can think of that might be causing the issue. My final test will be to create a new VM from scratch (unfortunately this will have to wait until next week) and see if it exists in the new VM. If it doesn't, then the VM must be corrupted; if it does, is it worth reporting this as a bug to the dev team?

I doubt it's a bug. Corruption can happen in a myriad of ways. Besides, if it was a bug there would be more reports of it happening.

[SpacemanSpiff]

I doubt it's a bug. Corruption can happen in a myriad of ways. Besides, if it was a bug there would be more reports of it happening.

Fair enough. I'll let you know happens!

[SpacemanSpiff]

I've created a new VM and new VDI file, and installed a new copy of Windows 7 on it … and the performance issues persist. Still the same stuttering / lag as before.

I'm at a loss as to what the cause is - but it's also now ruled out corruption of the VM or VDI file …

[loukingjr]

Sorry to hear you are still having issues. I have no idea at this point what the problem might be. I don't have SAGE to test so not much I can do. I suppose you could install Windows 7 in Bootcamp and see if that is okay. It would certainly eliminate any Yosemite issues. Or I suppose you could roll back to OSX 10.9.

[SpacemanSpiff]

I've attached an extract from my System.log which is from the moment I run Virtualbox, then starting the sluggish VM, booting into Windows 7 until I've got a full, usable (though sluggish) desktop, then shutting Windows 7 down until the VM quits, then quitting the Virtualbox app.

I'm a novice in understanding log files, but there do seem to be one or two things that don't seem to be right (though, admittedly, they might not be the cause of the slowdown): one, the system version is being incorrectly fetched as 10.9.0 and not 10.10.0; there seems to be some suggestion that system memory may increase abnormally; and there is something related to "aio_queue_async_request()" of which there are too many.

I have no idea whether any of these points are relevant; i thought I'd share them just in case.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Me neither!

I've worked with computers long enough to know that there's got to be some reason why it's happening - though I'm perfectly aware that it could be any number of (seemingly minor) things! It's just annoying that it seemed to work, and then went wrong again …

It's not practical for me to use bootcamp, as the need for Windows is a small proportion of my work but, when I am using it, I need to switch between Windows and Mac several times in the space of a few minutes! Also, it's not possible for me to roll back to Mavericks now - too much work has been done in the meantime for me to manually reconstruct the data from Time Machine.

I've got no other option than to stick with it; I'm hoping that some update or other may fix things at some point in the future.

[ChipMcK]

Question: When was your last 'clean install'?
I did such for Yosemite and for me the system is zippy compared to Mavericks.

Perhaps, a cache clean-out would help?

[loukingjr]

Me neither!

I've worked with computers long enough to know that there's got to be some reason why it's happening - though I'm perfectly aware that it could be any number of (seemingly minor) things! It's just annoying that it seemed to work, and then went wrong again …

It's not practical for me to use bootcamp, as the need for Windows is a small proportion of my work but, when I am using it, I need to switch between Windows and Mac several times in the space of a few minutes! Also, it's not possible for me to roll back to Mavericks now - too much work has been done in the meantime for me to manually reconstruct the data from Time Machine.

I've got no other option than to stick with it; I'm hoping that some update or other may fix things at some point in the future.

Just checking back and wanted to ask you if you could check something. Can you open Activity Monitor on your Mac while your Windows guest is running and see if there are any processes taking up a lot of CPU time?

[SpacemanSpiff]

Just checking back and wanted to ask you if you could check something. Can you open Activity Monitor on your Mac while your Windows guest is running and see if there are any processes taking up a lot of CPU time?

I've been monitoring the Activity Monitor over the last few days to see if I can see anything untoward chewing up CPU cycles (which is how I found that InterCheck Sophos process earlier on). However, i've tried it today, and the only thing really consuming CPU time is the VirtualBox VM. Nothing else of consequence is consuming resources.

It's weird.

[loukingjr]

My Windows 7 guest takes about 7% CPU at idle.
In W7 itself looking at Task Manager or Resource Manager it's less than 1% CPU.

edit: I'm running a 64bit guest btw. The CPU cycles should be about 4-5% for the 32bit guest.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Question: When was your last 'clean install'?
I did such for Yosemite and for me the system is zippy compared to Mavericks.

Perhaps, a cache clean-out would help?

Thanks for your suggestion, ChipMcK!

I've never done a clean install … I guess, as a work machine, I could never justify the down time to rebuild all the settings and apps to get it all working again. Anyway, I downloaded the latest version of OnyX for Yosemite, and used that to run the Unix maintenance scripts, and cleared all the system and app caches out … and it seems to have worked! (though whether it will work tomorrow remains to be seen )

It seems that I cleared about 25GB of cache files out, which would have had a profound effect on the system …

Thanks once again for your suggestions!

[loukingjr]

That might explain it. I did a clean install of OSX 10.10

[SpacemanSpiff]

My Windows 7 guest takes about 7% CPU at idle.
In W7 itself looking at Task Manager or Resource Manager it's less than 1% CPU.

edit: I'm running a 64bit guest btw. The CPU cycles should be about 4-5% for the 32bit guest.

That sounds about right. After booting up and leaving it to sort itself out, it's idling at between 4 and 5%.

That might explain it. I did a clean install of OSX 10.10

I guess it does! I knew there had to be some reason behind it!

Profuse thanks to you both, loukingjr and ChipMcK, for your suggestions and help. I really do appreciate you taking the time to help me!

Assuming it's working tomorrow morning, I'll mark the thread as [Solved].