VirtualBox makes Mac run incredibly slowly

[Chris2018]

Hi,

This problem has only occured over the last couple of months, previously the Mac and Virtualbox have worked well. But now as soon as I spark up Virtualbox on the Mac the whole machine slows down so much it's pretty unusable. This is BEFORE I have even tried to get a VM runnning. If I try to get a Virtual XP machine going it will take around 30 minutes before I see the XP desktop. When I quit Virtualbox the Mac is still left crawling a long, completely useless. I have to restart the Mac in order to carry on with any work.

We have a nearly identical MAC in the office which works fine. I have upgraded VB to the latest edition VirtualBox-5.2.6-120293-OSX.dmg and it makes no difference.

Info on the Mac
OSX El Capitan 10.11.6
3.2 Intel Core i5
32GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce GT 755M 1024MB
187GB free hdd space

Any ideas?

Thanks
Chris

[socratis]

This problem has only occured over the last couple of months

So, what changed between working and crawling?

This is BEFORE I have even tried to get a VM runnning.

What does that mean? Just launching the VirtualBox Manager? Or even before that?

If I try to get a Virtual XP machine going it will take around 30 minutes before I see the XP desktop.

There's something really weird going on here. Not even an actual WinXP would take that long...

When I quit Virtualbox the Mac is still left crawling a long, completely useless.

See above.

We have a nearly identical MAC in the office which works fine.

So, what's differences between the two? From hardware to software installed, with a lot of emphasis on the software.

We're going to need to see a VM log from a complete VM run:

• Start the VM from cold-boot (not from a paused or saved state) / Observe error / Shutdown the VM (force close it if you have to).
• With the VM completely shut down (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).

If you can get a log from the "nearly identical" other Mac as well, that's an added bonus.

Oh, and please post the output of the command:

• kextstat | grep -v com.apple

[Chris2018]

I'll answer your points in order as best I can.

I don't know what's changed between working, I far as I know nothing's changed that would explain the slowness but clearly something has.

The Mac slows to a near halt as soon as I run VirtualBox, before I have tried to even run a Guest Machine, i.e. XP, Debian etc. The Mac continues to run like a dog after I have quit VirtualBox and performance can only be restored via a reboot of the Mac

As far as I am aware the software on the other Mac is the same, ie same OS and until I upgraded VirtualBox to the latest on this machine they were running identical copies of VirtualBox and the corresponding VM.

I can't practically provide a log at the moment as it will mean taking the machine 'offline' for an hour while I try to start VirtualBox and then run a VM (Windows XP) and I have deadlines to meet today. Also it seems the log is only relevant for a slow VM (Guest Machine) but my problem is with VirtualBox itself.

[socratis]

This does not make sense. And until you provide some more clues/evidence, it will continue to not make sense. And you didn't give me the output of the "kextstat" command I asked for.

Look, you're sitting in front of two computer; one is fine, the other is not. I cannot possibly diagnose (or even suggest) what might be the problem with one that it's not. But I can tell you this: launching VirtualBox without any VMs, does little to nothing to a computer. Your problem is elsewhere...

[vicosoft]

Hello,

My case is the same. Previously I had VirtualBox 5.1 installed on Mac OS High Sierra and it worked fine. Since I installed VirtualBox 5.2.6 (latest version), I noticed that when I start working in a virtual machine it slows down after a while. With what it becomes impossible to work with the virtual machine.

I have tried different configurations in it, but with the same result.

VBox.zip

VBOX.log

(21.88 KiB) Downloaded 16 times

VBox1.zip

VBox.log.1 slow

(41.19 KiB) Downloaded 10 times

Code: Select all

$ kextstat | grep -v com.apple
Index Refs Address            Size       Wired      Name (Version) UUID <Linked Against>
  157    3 0xffffff7f85cb4000 0x63000    0x63000    org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv (5.2.6) C32CCC8B-7E44-3974-BEC0-9C1FA570690D <7 5 4 3 1>
  160    0 0xffffff7f85d17000 0x8000     0x8000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxUSB (5.2.6) A60E8437-734A-3C07-8488-5885145AEE0C <159 157 55 7 5 4 3 1>
  161    0 0xffffff7f85d1f000 0x5000     0x5000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetFlt (5.2.6) 552BD757-0D66-3F90-9A20-C6C7881F4A2F <157 7 5 4 3 1>
  162    0 0xffffff7f85d24000 0x6000     0x6000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetAdp (5.2.6) 8B8163C1-1125-36B8-AC6A-1AA38506938D <157 5 4 1>

I'm going to run the virtual machine again and I can send you all the information you ask me.

To start my Macbook Pro 15 retina, it has 16GB of ram, 256GB SSD drive. It is a fast team. As a virtualized machine I use Fedora 27 and I have assigned 4GB of RAM and 4 CPUs.

[Martin]

Your system only has four physical CPU cores.
Please try again with a guest VM set to <= 3 vCPUs so that the host has at least one core left to handle the running of the guest.

[vicosoft]

Hello, I just tried a configuration with only 2 CPUs and almost at the moment the system has started to go very slow again, making it impossible to work with it.

I enclose the output of the VBox.log file again.

With VirtualBox 5.1 I did not have to change the number of CPUs and the virtualized systems worked correctly. Although I do not want to change back to this version. We hope to find a solution soon.

Thank you.

new_VBox.zip

Vbox.log (new)

(21.32 KiB) Downloaded 12 times

[vicosoft]

Hi,

Do you know if this is being solved? I still have the same problem of slowness and it is impossible to work with VirtualBox.

regards,

[socratis]

Do you know if this is being solved?

I don't think there's anything to solve in your case. From your log:

00:00:01.336112 DMI Product Name: MacBookPro11,4

We have almost the same MBPr. One key difference is that mine (MacBookPro11,5) includes an extra "AMD Radeon R9 M370X", while yours contains only the "Intel Iris Pro 5200", which mine uses as it's secondary, low power GPU. Other than that, there's not that much of a difference between our two logs.

One thing I haven't seen is to put "slowness" in quantitative terms. What does "slow" mean to you? I don't see your VM being slow at all, we have maybe up to 1-2 seconds difference at the end of the startup sequence. So, can you explain please?

PS. For future reference, you should completely shut down the VM before grabbing the VBox.log. Then ZIP it before attaching it to your response, just like you did.

[vicosoft]

The matter remains the same. I have noticed that the system becomes slow when I maximize a window. If I have not previously maximized any window, the system works more or less well. But at the moment that a window is maximized, the system becomes very slow and there is no way to recover normality.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I use GNOME with Fedora 27.