[vbox-users] How to get best virtualbox performance?

[Frank Mehnert]

On Friday 19 September 2008, tchomby wrote:
> Can anyone give me any hints about improving the performance of my virtual
> machine?
> I'm running an Ubuntu 8.04 VM in VirtualBox 2.0.2 on Windows XP. I'm using
> Camtasia Studio in Windows to screen-capture the virtual machine windows.
> It works well but the vm's performance isn't too great, applications and
> windows take a long time to open. I tried increasing the base memory size
> and video memory of the vm but it didn't seem to make any difference.

Some advises:
* More host memory is better. You should have _at least_ 512MB. With
  512MB for the host I would suggest you to use 192-256MB for the
  one and only guest. With 1GB RAM use 384MB RAM. Don't assign too
  much of host your host RAM to the guest!
* Don't assign more than 8MB VRAM to the guest, this will not help
* A better host processor. It seems that the latest AMD-V processors
  (like Phenom 9150) show the best performance as VBox can use their
  nested paging feature
* For a normal Linux guest, try if activating VT-x/AMD-V helps to
  increase the performance or if the performance suffers, both is
  possible but usually the Raw mode is faster than VT-x/AMD-V (except
  AMD-V + nested paging)
* Recompile your guest kernel to use a 100HZ timer.
* Install the guest additions. The X extensions will increase the
  graphics performance
* Disable the USB controller for that VM. An active USB controller
  with one or more active USB devices will notably increase the host
  CPU load. We will improve this behaviour in future releases.
* Optimize the guest services. For WinXP guests, disable Virus scanners
  if possible.

Kind regards,

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert    Sun Microsystems    http://www.sun.com/
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