virtualbox.org

I just configured a windows 10 guest hosted by my Windows 10 install. I'm just checking if some software will run correctly on another machine. I gave the machine 6 cpus from my 5930k, (the max allowed) and I have 12 counting hyper threading. I tried lowering the cpu count, and changing which cpus are assigned to the vbox process through set affinity. I couldn't get permission to set affinity for all of the processes, just VBoxSVC.exe, and one of the smaller VirtualBox.exe. Not the process that is taking up 32,380 KB. (Which I think is the one I need to change the cores around for. I found some guides for how to get around permission denied, but the option seems to be missing in Windows 10 Task Manager. Does anyone know how to get permission to do that in Windows 10?

Previously, I had installed Windows 10 on a Linux host, and everything ran fine. (but that was setup through QEMU) I could try setting it up on my Linux install and see how it runs. I was just running if this is a known issue for Windows.
Have any suggestions?

Hyperthreads are not CPUs, you don't count them. Think about it: if threads equalled CPUs then why would Intel need to make chips with actual additional cores?

Also, extra CPUs generally dont make a VM faster. On the contrary, it will usually make it slower. Each CPU allocated is another context that needs to be saved and restored every time there's a transaction across the VM boundary. If the VM is not actually using the additional CPUs then the context switching is pure overhead, of no benefit whatever.


Please post a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

Then we'll see what you can actually afford to dedicate to the VM.

I understand that hyperthreads aren't the same as physical cores. That's why I thought keeping the core count at 6 would have been ideal. Even only giving the machine 1 core is still slow.

The log shows that you have all six host cores assigned to the VM.