Slowness with Virtualbox

[Richard Kuhns]

How many cores on your physical box?

I have a 6 core Dell precision 7810. If hyperthreading is enabled (so
FreeBSD apparently thinks I have 12 cores), and VMs running under
VirtualBox are so slow as to be totally unusable. If I disable
hyperthreading, VMs are still extremely slow but usable in case of
emergency.

My previous desktop only had 2 cores, but I had no issues with VMs.

Someone else (ohartman at zedat.fu-berlin.de, I think) mentioned that he'd
seen the same issue.

	- Richard

On 10/26/15 13:54, Christer Solskogen wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I wrote this yesterday without any response so far:
> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/poor-performance-with-virtualbox-ose.53722/
> 
> 
> Short story. My "pretty" fast FreeBSD server (host) runs Virtualbox
> guests (Linux/CentOS) very slowly. Much slower than I anticipated. I've
> had Linux on that box before with Virtualbox without the same slowness.
> Where should I begin to look?
> 
> And by slow, I mean /slow/. I have a PXE boot system where I can boot
> and install via kickstart a CentOS system in just about 4 min on a
> Windows machine with VirtualBox. On my FreeBSD host it takes about
> 10-15min. Network is slow, but disk seems to be OK.
> 
> If I put some load on the guest, the guest locks up and I loose network
> connection to it, while the console (from VirtualBox GUI) is not
> responding (but the GUI for VirtualBox is working properly)
> 
> Help, please!
> 
> FreeBSD friend 10.2-RELEASE-p4 FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE-p4 #0 r288404: Thu
> Oct 22 22:58:13 CEST 2015     root at friend:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/FRIEND 
> amd64
> 
> virtualbox-ose-4.3.32 (I have also tried the unofficial 5.x port, but
> with the same result)
> 


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