VirtualBox High CPU Usage

[thunderking2106]

After doing this my cpu spikes ceased to spike around 85% - 95% idling. within my XP Virtualmachine with 512mb dedicated memory. If you happen to have a modern processor (Core2Duo, Athlon/Turion) you can increase your VMs performance by enable hardware virtualization. with your VM shutdown go into the Sun XVM Virtualbox dialogue box. Right-click on your VM go to settings. Click on the advanced tab and check the Enable VT-x/AMDV select ok.

[sonoud]

Hi, I registered ubuntu forum because of this thread.
still no workaround yet?
I suffered this problem for 5 years already.
It seems my both thinkpad 600x and z60m can not run any virtual machines.
Sorry to say that I am running opensuse 11.0.
But I have exact the same problem!!!!
CPu is always 100% busy regardless whether the guest OS is installed or not.
as long as the VM is on. even dummy VM will make 100% cpu busy.
My CPU should be power enough for this.

model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz
2 GB RAM.

Regardless how much CPU and How much RAM I tried to assign to virtual machine. it doesn't help.

Forget to say that. I tried both VMware Workstation and VirtualBox. all VM softwares will give me the same result.

Since I suffered this for 5 years. I have kept finding solutions. but so far, no luck.

other people just keep telling me this is impossible. how can they run VMs easily ........

anyway, hopefully, some virtualbox experts or VM experts around here can provide me some tips.....

[yaknowwat]

I also suggest the non-free version it has bug fixes and improvements versus the full open version.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

also so people know they do have a repo for intrepid they just don't have it listed.

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian intrepid non-free

Make sure to get the verification key too.

[danwood76]

Have you tried qemu?

If you are running an x86 guest on an x86 host kqemu is really fast. (kernel mode accelerator)
Slow downs come when you are trying to run a, for example, mips guest on an x86 host.
Because of the translation of commands its a lot slower.

I use Qemu now, virtual box I found to be too slow, vmware is too bulky and proprietry (and very slow).
Also your processor is quite slow and outdated, with a faster processor you will end up with much better performance.
And also having dual cores helps a lot (as you obviously have the guest running mainly on one core and your host mainly on the other)
I currently run XP in a qemu virtual guest on my laptop and my desktop. Its fast enough to use happily on my laptop and its natural speed on my desktop.

[stickman77]

I has a slightly different issue with xp guest on ubuntu 8.10.

while the xp guest was idle is was virtualbox sitting at around 70% cpu constant on the host.

I have since discovered that it was googletalk causing the problem. I uninstalled googletalk and now the cpu usage on the host is 7% while the guest is idle.

I hope this may help others.

cheers

[Delever]

I moved from vmware to VirtualBox recently, and I think I managed to pin this problem more accurately.

See this bug report:

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/3613

It would be helpful if you try to repeat this scenario on your VirtualBox installation (by installing and running Google Chrome).

EDIT: or Google Talk (you need to login)

[jed4czar]

OK, a year down the track and I am using this solution - It seems a bit counter-intuitive but... Run a second VM, in my case, DSL with 64 mb ram (I think DSL can run with as little as 8mb) I turned everything else off (audio usb etc) so as not to interfere with other apps in the real pc. CPU loading comes down to <30%. Apparently it has something to do with Load Balancing of the CPU by VB. I can live with it.

Post Script: - You don't even need an OS in the VM. Just set up a new VM and boot to "no bootable medium found! System Halted" and it will still do the job"

[Lockheed]

Post Script: - You don't even need an OS in the VM. Just set up a new VM and boot to "no bootable medium found! System Halted" and it will still do the job"

ROTFL This hardly elegant solution is totally working!

[kammajaega]

thx a lot, seems to work here too, but only slightly changing cpu usage...

[kknull]

does not work with me...

host: ubuntu 9.04 64bit
guest: windows xp x64 edition