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Hello,

I am wondering if adding physical memory to my Windows Host will improve the performance/responsiveness of the Guest O/S Virtual Machines and the Windows Host as well.

I am successfully running VBox 5.0.12r on a Windows 7 Pro 64-bit Host and have several VM's (64-bit Windows 7 and 10), although I normally will only run one at a time. However, the responsiveness (performance) of the Guest VMs seems poor and I find that the Guest VM responds with noticeable delays/lags.

By way of one example there's a noticeable delay when typing the username and password in the Windows 10 login - I can type a few characters and there's a noticeable delay before they appear on screen. Similarly there are noticeable delays/lags when clicking the mouse to open the Windows menu.

When the Guest VM is running, I notice degraded performance on the Host. By way of example, when a Guest VM is running and the Host runs Word 2010, the responsivness of various Word operations is noticeably degraded.

Since my Windows Host has 8GB of RAM and can be upgraded to a max of 16GB at modest cost, I'm wondering if adding physical memory will improve performance on the Host and Guest.

Any recommendations/tips/tricks would be most welcome.

Here are the details:

Windows 7 Pro 64-bit Host has the following physical attributes;
System Board: Intel DP55WG
Processor: i7 860 @ 2.8Ghz
Physical Memory: 8GB installed (16GB Max)

PC operation, physical or virtual, will perform better when the OS does not have to swap memory pages to the hard drive as often. The less actual memory the OS has to use, the more often the OS will have to swap to the drive to run what the OS & user want to run.

Guest "speed" (such as boot time, program loading time, and swap speed) also increases with faster host hard drives. SSDs are the fastest practical drive to store your guest's vdi's. Having to swap to a slow hard drive is a double whammy.

I think the guest will run smoother, up to a point, if the amount of memory in the guest is equal to or bigger than the amount the guest needs at a certain time. If the guest doesn't have enough, it will have to swap, and will run less smoothly. Adding host memory will improve this if the guest in turn is given more of that host memory. Simply adding host memory without letting the guest use it may allow more guests to run but will not improve guest performance if memory & swap activity is an issue in the guest.

How much memory do you put in your guests?

Thanks for the speedy reply!

I get your comments about swapping memory pages out to disk, and also that if one adds physical memory to the Host the VMs don't pick that up and the VMs have to be configured to change memory allottedment.

The Windows Host boot/swap disk is an SSD drive (albeit an older Intel X25-M) and I've allotted 8GB "Virtual Memory" for the Windows Host paging file on that SSD. The Guest .vdi files reside on a second SSD (same make/model).

You asked how much memory has been allotted to the Guest (Windows 10 64-bit): - I've allotted 2048MB. The Host has 8GB, which leaves roughly 6GB for the Host.

Might you have any other recommendations or configuration tweaks?

By the way - I wonder if there's some way to actively monitor the Host resources used by the VM?

You can monitor the host processes with Microsoft Sysinternals Process Explorer.

Your guests are on an SSD, good. Even older SSDs should be faster than platter drives.

My Dell Venue 8 tablet has 2GB and is running Windows 10 natively. Runs nice and quick. 2GB shouldn't be that bad of a problem, especially when responding to keyboard presses.

Maybe a Vbox.log might help diagnosing the slowness. And someone to interpret them too, unfortunately, I wouldn't know how to figure out what might be wrong in Virtualbox that would cause a sluggish guest.