[Solved] Painfully slow: VBox 4.3.20r96997 on Win8.1/x64

[User7777777]

Vbox 4.3.20 is extremely slow on my 8.1/x64 machine (up to date) and that is not because of lack of resources: 4 cores/8 threads @3GHz+, 24GB RAM, LSI RAID arrays that can do up to 600MB/s. Allocating more than 2 vCPUs makes the guest almost unusable. The i/o inside the guest is a joke (barely scratching the surface at 10GB/s) no matter what I kind of storage controller choose SATA/SAS/SCSI.

This wasn't as bad in the past. The 4.3 version seemed to improve things for a while then things degraded significantly - somewhere along the way I also upgraded the host to Win8 from Win7. Unfortunately, I was busy with other stuff and only updated the VBox version without properly testing for a while so I can't say when the trouble started. What I do know is that 4.3.18 performs better (better than 4.3.20, but not as well as I was used to).

Right now I am testing with a Win10 preview guest. 4.3.20 was unusable. Even moving the mouse inside the guest was slow. Downgrading to 4.3.18 made it usable although still nowhere to where I was used with it should be. Interestingly, inside the guest I see the CPU used 90%+ at almost all times, while on the host the CPU is barely used. I would upload logs, but I see no errors therefore don't want to waste anybody's time. The VBox executable(s) are excluded from antivirus along with the vm files so antivirus should not be a factor, but for the record I am running Norton Security 2015.

For whatever it may matter, Win7 guests are also slow...

Any pertinent ideas please share as I am out of options.

[loukingjr]

I can't address everything but with 4 physical cores you shouldn't assign more than 2 cores to a guest. Using more than that will most likely slow things down.

[User7777777]

I used to be able to assign 4 vcores to 1 vm as the host was only used to run the vm.

[loukingjr]

well, you can try 2 and see if it's better right?

[User7777777]

I am using 2 and watching movie in slow motion - please see above.

[loukingjr]

I read your posts. All I can say is I know the number of cores makes a difference. I can also say I am running multiple guests both Linux and Windows guests (7-10 TP) and have no perfomance issues. But like I said, I can only address the cores issue because I have no Windows host machines.

[User7777777]

I hope someone out there has encountered this on Windows 8.1/x64, knows the solution, and is willing to share it

Thank you for checking it out

[loukingjr]

you're welcome. btw, Windows 10 isn't all that slow even without guest additions installed. (which don't work with the 9926 build).

[User7777777]

Win7 (guest) used to "fly" - now slow as a hog...

[loukingjr]

hopefully someone will be along to help.

[mpack]

Minimum information needed for assistance.

[User7777777]

Thank you for the link. Here is the environment info:

• VirtualBox version: 4.3.20 r96997; Guest additions 4.3.20 r96997 are installed in the guest
• Host O/S: Windows 8.1 x64 (up to date) with 24GB RAM, Guest: Windows 10 x64 developers preview (similar issues can be seen with Windows 7 x64 as guest on this machine) with 8GB of RAM
• Please note that:
• • the exact same vm works well (as expected) on a simpler machine (no RAID card) that runs Windows 7 x64
  • I had no issues with previous versions of VirtualBox on this machine when running Windows 7 x64 ...
• I broke the log file into two pieces: part1 & part2 as the original file exceeds the maximum limit allowed for uploads

[loukingjr]

Just for the future, you can compress log files before you attach them.

[User7777777]

Well, it looks like the new version (4.3.22) along with a few configuration changes addressed the issue. We can close this thread as it's solved.