virtualbox.org

I'm hoping for some help with this question. After a period of several months without using my Windows 10 VM, I had a use for it again. Fired up Vbox, was prompted to update. Ran the update... but found that something had changed in such a way that the graphics controller was broken, resulting in an unstable/unusable Windows display. After some struggle I realized I needed to get onto the current version of the graphics controller and re-run the guest additions. This resulted in a stable/usable display, but... performance has been very poor since: laggy mouse, laggy window opening, very laggy typing. I read through some threads here for ideas on how to improve performance of a Windows guest machine, but none of these helped noticeably.

Host system: late 2015 iMac
macOS Catalina 10.15.1
4 cores
8 GB memory

Guest system
Win 10 32 bit
2 cores assigned
2 GB memory assigned
256 MB video memory assigned
VBox SVGA controller
2D/3D acceleration enabled

Log file attached. I'd appreciate any help the group can provide.

Are you sure you're using VBoxSVGA? The log seems to indicate VMSVGA, which is intended for Linux guests.

Also the VM name is "win-7 Clone", so was this updated to Win10 from Win7?

Also I'm seeing the Guest Additions loaded and running after only 10 seconds, which implies quite good performance to me (my own minimal Win10 VM reaches that state in 8 seconds on a graphics oriented desktop PC). In fact the entire run time of the session is only 7 minutes.

mpack wrote:Are you sure you're using VBoxSVGA? The log seems to indicate VMSVGA, which is intended for Linux guests.

The OP is using VBoxSVGA. Please take a look (again ) at viewtopic.php?f=1&t=91141#p437822, where socratis explained the hints in the VBox.log file. Or his more up-to-date version in viewtopic.php?f=3&t=95008&start=0#p459311.

I'll freely admit that I also don't really like that one has to memorize those hints. It's a good example of "from the developer, for the developer".

VBox.log file wrote:00:00:01.114906 Host RAM: 8192MB (8.0GB) total, 3301MB (3.2GB) available

Your available memory situation is not very comfortable. Do you notice any differences if you start your VM right after starting your host OS?

Besides that, I haven't noticed anything special in your VBox.log file. I'd use the tools on the Windows guest OS (e.g. Task Manager, Event Viewer) to analyze the behavior of the Windows guest OS, as if it was running on a real PC.

Before we go much further, let's have clarity on what "poor performance" means, i.e. what aspect, since the log doesn't seem to be showing it.

I'll take a look at these hints, thanks. With respect to poor performance: lags in startup of applications, lags in mouse movement, and most especially: lags in typing. Text appears on the screen several seconds behind entering on the keyboard. It may not seem like much, but it's maddening if you're an error-prone typer like me.

Ok, some follow-up. I've had a look at the logs and the settings box and confirmed that I am using VBoxSVGA. Also: yes, the machine was upgraded from Win 7, but that happened probably a year and a half ago, and once I fought through that upgrade, I'd had no issues until this weekend.

With respect to the memory situation: I shut down all non-relevant applications on the host and rebooted. Once I fired up the virtual machine, the overall memory situation didn't change much from what was reported earlier. But again, this is the same setup I've been using all along without any performance issues.

I am coming to believe that the problems are coming from within the Win 10 host machine, however. Review of the task manager seems to indicate that there's a tremendous amount of CPU use going on, by a variety of different services, etc. It's possible that after a long period of disuse, the anti-virus and Windows upgrade services are all trying to get themselves updated, and this is chewing up a bunch of resources. My intent is to let the VM run for a while, and see if this sorts itself out.

sean_p wrote:Review of the task manager seems to indicate that there's a tremendous amount of CPU use going on, by a variety of different services, etc.

If your Guest is using resources (CPU/RAM), these resources have to come from the Host. Especially high I/O rates...

sean_p wrote:My intent is to let the VM run for a while, and see if this sorts itself out.

Give it a day or two. BTW, this happens on physical systems too, I have a Win10-64 that takes a lot of time to settle, each time it boots up...