Snow Leopard on Virtualbox, extremely slow performance

[gattu marrudu]

Hi there,

I am running OSX 10.6.6i on Virtualbox (Hazard version), on an Arch linux host.

It installs fine, and the first day I used it was ok.

Since today, the performance has become so slow that the system is unusable. I don't know if I modified some significant settings on the VM.

Just dragging windows around is unbearably clunky, menus appear after 1-2 seconds after clicking. Clicking an icon on Finder can take up to half a minute to show the enlarged icon ("preview"). Booting takes forever. Reinstalling is 10x slower than normal (more than 2h instead of the 14m expected)

I tried several options, including reinstalling from the DVD iso, to no avail.

A windows XP guest runs much more smoothly on the same host, even with the other guest open.

I also tried a pre-installed version on a vmdk image and it was even worse.

 

Host configuration:

Arch Linux 2.6.37

Mobile Intel Core2 Duo T9400@2.53GHz

4Gb RAM

NVidia Quadro FX770 graphics with 512Mb RAM

 

VM configuration:

Machine: OSX Server

RAM: 1024Mb (tried up to 1536Mb)

Chipset: ICH9

IO APIC: on

EFI: Off

UTC clock: Off

Abs pointing device: On

PAE: On

VT-x: On

Nested paging: On, but it shows disabled in status bar when the VM is running

Video: 64Mb, no acceleration

Storage: SATA controller, AHCI, tried both with and without host IO cache

Primary hard disk: 20Gb

Audio: Off

Network: bridged, eth0

USB: 2.0 enabled

 

I tried several other combinations too but I can't improve performance anyway.

 

Any hints?

Thanks

gm

[LogicPro]

Hi there,

I am running OSX 10.6.6i on Virtualbox (Hazard version), on an Arch linux host.

It installs fine, and the first day I used it was ok.

Since today, the performance has become so slow that the system is unusable. I don't know if I modified some significant settings on the VM.

Just dragging windows around is unbearably clunky, menus appear after 1-2 seconds after clicking. Clicking an icon on Finder can take up to half a minute to show the enlarged icon ("preview"). Booting takes forever. Reinstalling is 10x slower than normal (more than 2h instead of the 14m expected)

I tried several options, including reinstalling from the DVD iso, to no avail.

A windows XP guest runs much more smoothly on the same host, even with the other guest open.

I also tried a pre-installed version on a vmdk image and it was even worse.

 

Host configuration:

Arch Linux 2.6.37

Mobile Intel Core2 Duo T9400@2.53GHz

4Gb RAM

NVidia Quadro FX770 graphics with 512Mb RAM

 

VM configuration:

Machine: OSX Server

RAM: 1024Mb (tried up to 1536Mb)

Chipset: ICH9

IO APIC: on

EFI: Off

UTC clock: Off

Abs pointing device: On

PAE: On

VT-x: On

Nested paging: On, but it shows disabled in status bar when the VM is running

Video: 64Mb, no acceleration

Storage: SATA controller, AHCI, tried both with and without host IO cache

Primary hard disk: 20Gb

Audio: Off

Network: bridged, eth0

USB: 2.0 enabled

 

I tried several other combinations too but I can't improve performance anyway.

 

Any hints?

Thanks

gm

 

 

You may have given your VM too much of your host systems resources ie: processors and ram.

[gattu marrudu]

You may have given your VM too much of your host systems resources ie: processors and ram.

 

RAM is 25% of total, one CPU core out of two is used and video memory is 64Mb of 512 available. I tried shutting down the main programs (I use a lightweight WM too) and I can see my CPU at 60-70% (40-50% is VBox) and it still runs slow.

 

One thing I noticed is that the virtual HD keeps scratching while the physical one barely has any activity at times.

Another thing could be that the graphics adapter has no kext loaded. So QE is not enabled and windowServer sucks a huge amount of resources. But that's normal for virtualBox since no kext has been developed yet for the virtualBox graphics adapter.

 

UPDATE:

I just rolled back from VirtualBox 4.0.4 to 3.2.12. OSX is now working at great speed!