Laggy Windows 7 Guest - Not sure what's causing it!

[Safwan]

Hey,

I am hosting a windows 7 (32-bit) Guest from Windows 8.1 (Enterprise 64-bit) Host. For some reason my windows 7 guest is quite laggy.

Some notice to help identify the issue

- Intel Virtualization is enabled from BIOS
- Hyper-V enabled.
- My Processor: Intel i7-5820k (12 Cores CPU @ 3.30 GHz)
- 6 CPU Cores assigned (out of 12 available). PAE/NX Enabled.
- 3072 MB RAM allocated. 15.00 GB VDI
- 256 MB Video allocated. 3D & 2D enabled.


I get very laggy/choppy screen. With the amount of resources allocated my VM shouldn't be lagging on single Runescape game client. Only running single Runescape game client (Google Runescape for reference) My CPU usage jumps from 9% to 48% and in between back and forth. 24% of Physical memory in use.

What could be causing the lag and how can I improve the performance of the VM? Any help would be appreciated. Not a tech-savvy lad but I can hope to figure something out here.

[Perryg]

- My Processor: Intel i7-5820k (12 Cores CPU @ 3.30 GHz)

Slight correction. The 5820K processor has 6 cores and 12 threads.

If you supply all the cores to the guest it will be extremely slow. You always need to save at least one full core for the host.

[Safwan]

- My Processor: Intel i7-5820k (12 Cores CPU @ 3.30 GHz)

Slight correction. The 5820K processor has 6 cores and 12 threads.

If you supply all the cores to the guest it will be extremely slow. You always need to save at least one full core for the host.

I reduced the cores to 4 to see if it'll reduce the lag but it didn't. The lag/choppy-ness is still the same. However my CPU usage isn't exceeding 60-70% of total.

[michaln]

There may be an improvement in the latest test build for Windows hosts (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds) starting with r106969.

As a rule, always assign the minimum of VCPUs to VMs, not as many as you think you can spare.

[stefan.becker]

Have a look at the Taskmanager, showing Processes from all Users.

Is there a svchost.exe with more than 50 % cpu?