virtualbox.org

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

hopefully someone will be along to help.

Minimum information needed for assistance.

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

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

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.