virtualbox 4.2.4 tooooo slow

[Bernhard Fröhlich]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 9:24 AM, 진석오 <jsukoh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear,
>
> I installed virtualbox 4.2.4(CFT) on zfs FreeBSD 9.1-RC3
>
> installing and windows guest(windows 8) install with guest addition was
> successful.
> but the windows guest is too slow, it is hardly usable.
>
> my hardware specs.
> intel i7 quad core 3.6. ghz, with 8 thread
> mem 16G
> motherboard - asrock z79 extreme 6.
> intel SSD 120G.
>
>
> my virtualbox vdi file is at zroot/bigfile, with
> primaryache, secondarycache = NONE, even sync=disabled because of slow
> performance.
>
> virtual machine settings
> - mem  4096M, cpu 4ea
> - 25g vdi(SATA controller) with SSD ticked
> - VT-x/AMD-V, Nested Paging
> - video 128M
>
>
>
> I tried the VB on UFS because ZFS was too slow, but the result was the
> same..
> I downgraded to FreeBSD 9.0 on UFS or / ZFS, but but the result was the
> same..
> and  I tried virtualbox 4.1.22 on FB 9.0/9.1-RC3,but but the result was the
> same..
>
> but sad story is that
> I found that virtualbox 4.2.4 on linux(opensuse 12.2, ext4) was very fast.
> opensuse is installed on the second harddisk(NOT SSD)  at the same computer.
>
> virtualbox zfs/FreeBSD on SSD is much slower than virtualbox ext4/opensuse
> on SATA2 harddisk...
>
>
> do I have any miss to setup on FreeBSD? I do not want to reboot to linux
> just because of virtualbox....
>
> please let me know what I should do, if you use virtualbox on FreeBSD
> without any problem...
>
> thank you in advance...
>
> from jsuk

I would start doing some easy tests to verify what slow really means.
Is it related
to CPU, I/O, network? What does top say on the host? Is the VM consuming lots
of CPU all the time or generating an unusual high number of interrupts?

VirtualBox tries to use hardware CPU features for virtualization BUT it also has
a software emulation fallback (from QEMU I think) but that is painfully slow so
usually when someone says "vbox is slow" that is a sign of either your CPU
features weren't detected correctly or your BIOS has a bug and doesn't announce
them properly. In either case checking that you run the latest BIOS is
a good idea.

If you had a look at that stuff please attach your ~/VirtualBox
VMs/Logs/VBox.log

-- 
Bernhard Froehlich
http://www.bluelife.at/