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Machines in VirtualBox acting ultra-sluggish.

C

CBGFilms

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 16, 2008
118
0
So I got my new iMac yesterday, it's a 21.5" with 4GB memory and an i7 processor. It's all great except this...

I switched using the migration assitant from a time machine backup, when I tried going on VirtualBox on my new machine my Windows XP machine was ultra-sluggish, so I installed Windows 7 on VirtualBox but it's still acting really sluggish? I also tried deleting and reinstalling the app, no luck.

What I mean by sluggish is.. the graphics things move really slowly with a low framerate, and when I hover my mouse over the machine's display horizontal 'window lines' are made it's kinda hard to explain, the graphics are a bit weird basically. The virtual systems are pretty much unusable.
 
CBGFilms said:
So I got my new iMac yesterday, it's a 21.5" with 4GB memory and an i7 processor. It's all great except this...

I switched using the migration assitant from a time machine backup, when I tried going on VirtualBox on my new machine my Windows XP machine was ultra-sluggish, so I installed Windows 7 on VirtualBox but it's still acting really sluggish? I also tried deleting and reinstalling the app, no luck.

What I mean by sluggish is.. the graphics things move really slowly with a low framerate, and when I hover my mouse over the machine's display horizontal 'window lines' are made it's kinda hard to explain, the graphics are a bit weird basically. The virtual systems are pretty much unusable.
Click to expand...

Did you install the addons? I know Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox have a driver set you're supposed to install once you've put your OS in the VM to increase speed and capability.
 
tsugaru said:
Did you install the addons? I know Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox have a driver set you're supposed to install once you've put your OS in the VM to increase speed and capability.
Click to expand...

It's so unusable that I think it would be a struggle to even do that, it's even sluggish when starting up, the boot-up graphics are slow.
 
Open Activity Monitor, select the "Memory" tab at the bottom and check the swap usage while the VMs are running. If more than just a few MB of swap is used, your virtual machines eat up too much RAM.

And also: Check how much memory your have assigned to your individual virtual machines. It should be at least 512mb for XP and 2gb for Windows 7, and of course more depending on what programs are running inside the VM. You may want to check if there's any swap usage inside the VMs using the Windows task manager.
 
As well as the experience being very slow, bars and animations moving slow, things like this happen too? http://d.pr/O5Zn

I've tried maxing out the video memory to 128mb, no luck. Also tried putting memory upto 2GB, no luck. Tried turning on all the 2D, 3D stuff.. any suggestions? Worked fine on my 3 year old early '08 iMac!
 
Hmm... looks like either an issue with VirtualBox (any known issues with Sandy Bridge CPUs? Do you have the latest version installed?) or maybe a hardware problem on your iMac. I would check for bad memory. If everything is fine and you don't encounter any issues with OSX, the problem is probably with VirtualBox.


On a side note: 512mb is way too low for Win7 64bit, but that doesn't seem to be the main problem here.
 
1. Check activation of hardware virtualization support
2. Check real disk fragmentation
3. Check swapping
4. Check add-ons installed
5. Check virtual disk fragmentation
 
cube said:
1. Check activation of hardware virtualization support
2. Check real disk fragmentation
3. Check swapping
4. Check add-ons installed
5. Check virtual disk fragmentation
Click to expand...

1. How?
2. How?
3. How?
4. None.
5. How?
 
1. VM configuration
2. eg. TechTool Pro (DO NOT run defragmentation from DVD, but from another partition or hard drive).
3. Activity Monitor, 'top'
4. Install from VM menu
5. Guest OS defragmentation tools
 
2. TTP: You could just run File Optimization from the startup volume. This should defragment the files containing the virtual disks, assuming the free space in the volume is not overly fragmented.
 
You can get 2 levels of fragmentation with VMs. if you fill up your drives, the disk will move all around the place.

Or you can put your VMs in an SSD and never defragment.
 
Fragmentation can be very bad for VM performance but it's usually not that bad.

My bet is still on swapping, either on the host machine or inside the VM.
 
Just opted to switch to Parallels in the end, I like the interface much better too, thanks for your suggestions anyway! :apple:
 
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