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Poor performance in Debian guest?

Posted: 29. Mar 2017, 05:20
by Boomer
Hey there!

I just did a fresh install of VBox on Win10, with a semi-high end system:
  • 16GB DDR3 RAM
  • Intel i7-4790
  • MIS AMD r9 390x
I have installed Guest Additions, allocated 50GB to a virtual HDD, and I have also given the guest 8GB of RAM.

Despite all of this, my guest runs slowly a lot of the time. When nothing is open (on the guest) and is fullscreen, it's seamless, as if running a linux partition. However, many programs (Firefox, Eclipse, whatever) the guest's performance drops. The mouse starts stuttering, while typing the letters/words appear to the screen in bursts, and so on.

8GB RAM should be plenty for the guest to run all of the things I've tried with no problems. My Host never lags, ever, no matter what I'm doing in the guest environment.

Are there any suggestions to how I might tweak this to improve performance?

Re: Poor performance in Debian guest?

Posted: 29. Mar 2017, 09:58
by socratis
Follow a "start from cold-boot"/"observe error"/"shutdown" cycle. With the VM shut down completely (not paused or saved), right-click on the VM in the VirtualBox Manager and select "Show Log". Save only the first "VBox.log", ZIP it and attach it to your response (see the "Upload attachment" tab below the reply form).

Re: Poor performance in Debian guest?

Posted: 29. Mar 2017, 12:01
by Boomer
Thanks for your reply, but I fixed the issue.

In case anyone else has the same problem: All it took was allocating extra video memory and more threads on the processor.

It had been a while since I used VBox and I had forgotten these features existed.

Re: Poor performance in Debian guest?

Posted: 29. Mar 2017, 14:45
by socratis
Boomer wrote:more threads on the processor
Did you perhaps mean "more virtual CPUs to the guest" ?

Re: Poor performance in Debian guest?

Posted: 29. Mar 2017, 16:06
by Boomer
socratis wrote:
Boomer wrote:more threads on the processor
Did you perhaps mean "more virtual CPUs to the guest" ?
I had assumed it was increasing the number of cores, but that is probably what I meant.