Shared Folder in Virtual Box VERY slow

[falconindy]

Could you give me a better understanding of network shares vs VB Shared Folders. The folder is on a single HDD on my laptop.

A network share is what you access on someone else's computer. Suppose you and I shared a LAN, and I had some music you wanted to get to. I'd just share the directory and you'd be able to read that share remotely.

VirtualBox's shared folders are accessed sort of in a similar manner to network shares, but the underlying concept isn't the same -- only the method of access. Instead of going out over your ethernet connection, you're just going to your local disk directly. The way they chose to implement it seems to cause some confusion.

[theZoid]

Well, my thinking is that you're seeing slow performance because of there being too much hard drive activity going on for a single drive to handle elegantly. Do you have the ability to separate the guest and host OS onto separate physical hard drives? If you do, it may take away some of the latency you're seeing. You won't need to reinstall Windows via VBox to do this -- just move the .vdi file and locate the file for VBox when it complains that the .vdi is missing.

I may try that...I have a couple of large externals...thanks

[rhynolu]

Hi,

if you are suffered by accessing share folder too slow, maybe you can try that:

1. if your vm is running Windows,
2. if your share folder name is like that : "\\vboxsvr\<share fodler>"
3. if you install windows in disk c of your vm
4. please modify c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
5. modify the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to "127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr"
6. reboot vm, and you can see there's a lot of improvement.

[issueperson]

Hi,

if you are suffered by accessing share folder too slow, maybe you can try that:

1. if your vm is running Windows,
2. if your share folder name is like that : "\\vboxsvr\<share fodler>"
3. if you install windows in disk c of your vm
4. please modify c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
5. modify the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to "127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr"
6. reboot vm, and you can see there's a lot of improvement.

Can you tell me what I just did? Because this really helped my speed a lot.

[falconindy]

Can you tell me what I just did? Because this really helped my speed a lot.

You saved yourself a DNS lookup every time you access VBOXSVR.

[user667]

Hi,

if you are suffered by accessing share folder too slow, maybe you can try that:

1. if your vm is running Windows,
2. if your share folder name is like that : "\\vboxsvr\<share fodler>"
3. if you install windows in disk c of your vm
4. please modify c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
5. modify the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to "127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr"
6. reboot vm, and you can see there's a lot of improvement.

Holy schnikes, that actually worked. THANK YOU!!! I've been suffering with this problem for months now.

[theZoid]

Hi,

if you are suffered by accessing share folder too slow, maybe you can try that:

1. if your vm is running Windows,
2. if your share folder name is like that : "\\vboxsvr\<share fodler>"
3. if you install windows in disk c of your vm
4. please modify c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
5. modify the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to "127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr"
6. reboot vm, and you can see there's a lot of improvement.

That's exactly what I was looking for....I'm trying it now....

EDIT: Incredible SPEED UP thanks !!

[Kalex12]

The map network drive in the XP guest worked great for me, no lag at all now.
Host is Ubuntu 64

[ssagi]

Hi,

if you are suffered by accessing share folder too slow, maybe you can try that:

1. if your vm is running Windows,
2. if your share folder name is like that : "\\vboxsvr\<share fodler>"
3. if you install windows in disk c of your vm
4. please modify c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
5. modify the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to "127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr"
6. reboot vm, and you can see there's a lot of improvement.

that is amazing. I am using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and was suffering from this problem for maybe a year. So much that I gave Vbox up in favor of VMware with very slow setup time.

I also explored many forums in Vbox who reported that with no help.
I now work solely with Vbox for my XP applications (MS Office) and am very content.

[cforput]

Hi,

if you are suffered by accessing share folder too slow, maybe you can try that:

1. if your vm is running Windows,
2. if your share folder name is like that : "\\vboxsvr\<share fodler>"
3. if you install windows in disk c of your vm
4. please modify c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
5. modify the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to "127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr"
6. reboot vm, and you can see there's a lot of improvement.

rhynolu,
you are a genius! I had this saved and only now had a chance to try it and WHAMO!!!! This works great. I can now sop thinking of the suffering I would go through to install VMWare.

You ROCK.........