Ubuntu Host with very slow Win8.1 Guest

[geoffcummins]

I have been running Ubuntu as my desktop for many years. I have been using virtualbox to run windows for a long time as well.
Recently everything was getting slow. So I decided it was time to update. I got a pretty decent gaming machine so that I shouldn't have any slowness. It appears things that have to do graphics, even clicking the "start" take seconds, possibly even minutes in the guest OS. I have looked around for solutions, but I am at my wits end!

Here is what I have,
Host:
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz
RAM: 64GB
Video: Geforce GTX 960 SC
OS: Ubuntu 15.04
Virtualbox 5.02 r102096

Guest:
CPU: I gave 1 to 4 CPUs with no change
RAM: 8GB
OS: Windows 8.1 Pro x64

Any idea would be greatly appreciated, I haded to 7z the log, as it was bigger than 128K

[Perryg]

I don't see an issue in the log file, but I also don't think this has to do with the Linux host. Moving to Windows guests so the Windows folks will have a better chance to see your topic.

[mpack]

Windows Guests are often slow when first installed: they do a lot of update checking and disk indexing.

Without information on what guest process is taking all the CPU or I/O time, anything we say here will be pointless speculation. Unfortunately the VirtualBox log will not tell you what processes were running in the guest.

IMHO: the mistake was in the decision to reinstall instead of pin down the original slowness. Windows doesn't just get slow all by itself, it gets slow because software is running which uses more bandwidth. Identify and eliminate. I've been using the same XP installation now for about 8 years (image migrated as I upgrade PCs), and if anything it has gotten faster in that time, because of the better hardware and because I keep a regular eye on what processes are running.

[geoffcummins]

Thank you for the help, at last I think I can stop looking at Virtualbox, and start focusing in on Windows... I didn't just upgrade my VM because it was slow, I updated my host. I updated my VM because it was running 32bit Vista and I wanted 64bit Win8.1, I have never been able to upgrade from 32bit to 64bit. My old host I was running Vista32 and Win10TP 64 for a while, but it got to a point where as soon as I turned on a second VM my whole system was come to a grinding halt. Which is why I opted for tons of CPU /RAM.

I have been running my Win8.1 for a couple months now I think it was much quicker to begin with, even when I was going through and pushing a bunch of updates. I will try to start focusing in on what in particular is being slower than I expect it should

[mbay2015]

I had a similar problem running a Win 7 Guest under an Ubuntu 14.04 host. Everything worked great for about a year, then the Win 7 Guest started pegging the host CPU (I've got 256 GB of RAM and 6 3.4 GHz Intel Broadwell cores, so the system is pretty beefy). It seemed like it only happened when I had a combination of Chrome running on the host and Outlook running on the guest (though this is a typical combination).

I tried every suggestion I could find on various forums, but nothing helped. FWIW, both the guest and host were installed to a single internal SSD drive. I saw a lot of I/O activity from the guest when Outlook was running, so my theory is the writes to the SSD simultaneously from the guest and host were somehow bogging down the overall system. The guest did run fine with Safe+Networking mode but I could never isolate the culprit with any certainty.

I moved the virtual box guest image to a second physical SSD, and the problem went away. Things are running very fast on both host and guest. YMMV.