Hello,
I was used to vmware, and decided to install virtualbox. Well it is
tremendously slow, for starting even, and for
displaying any windows. It is like the CPU is 200pct running in parallel.
Well I do not know what can be wrong with virtualbox, but it is of total no use.

If you would like more information about the system, please do not hesitate. I
would rather that it works virtualbox, but
ok nope

Regards

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-5-686
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages VirtualBox depends on:
ii adduser 3.102 Add and remove users and groups
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.11etch1 Debian configuration management sy
ii libc6 2.3.6.ds1-13etch5 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libgcc1 1:4.1.1-21 GCC support library
ii libglib2.0-0 2.12.4-2 The GLib library of C routines
ii libidl0 0.8.6-1 library for parsing CORBA IDL file
ii libqt3-mt 3:3.3.7-4etch1 Qt GUI Library (Threaded runtime v
ii libsdl1.2debian 1.2.11-8 Simple DirectMedia Layer
ii libssl0.9.8 0.9.8c-4etch1 SSL shared libraries
ii libstdc++6 4.1.1-21 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii libx11-6 2:1.0.3-7 X11 client-side library
ii libxcursor1 1.1.7-4 X cursor management library
ii libxml2 2.6.27.dfsg-2 GNOME XML library
ii libxslt1.1 1.1.19-1 XSLT processing library - runtime
ii libxt6 1:1.0.2-2 X11 toolkit intrinsics library
ii psmisc 22.3-1 Utilities that use the proc filesy

Versions of packages VirtualBox recommends:
ii acroread 8.1.2-0.1 Adobe Acrobat Reader: Portable Doc
ii binutils 2.17-3 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
pn bridge-u <none> (no description available)
ii evince [ 0.4.0-5 Document (postscript, pdf) viewer
ii gcc 4:4.1.1-15 The GNU C compiler
ii gv [pdf- 1:3.6.2-3 PostScript and PDF viewer for X
ii kpdf [pd 4:3.5.5-3etch2 PDF viewer for KDE
ii libasoun 1.0.13-2 ALSA library
ii libhal1 0.5.8.1-9 Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii libpulse 0.9.5-5etch1 PulseAudio client libraries
ii libsdl-t 2.0.8-3+b1 ttf library for Simple DirectMedia
ii linux-he 2.6.18.dfsg.1-18~snapshot.10143 Common header files for Linux 2.6.
ii linux-he 2.6.18.dfsg.1-18~snapshot.10143 Header files for Linux 2.6.18 on P
ii make 3.81-2 The GNU version of the "make" util
pn uml-util <none> (no description available)
ii xpdf-rea 3.01-9.1+etch2 Portable Document Format (PDF) sui
ii xpdf-uti 3.01-9.1+etch2 Portable Document Format (PDF) sui

-- no debconf information

vbox uses emulated bios but you choose how much ram to give...it uses the same speed cpu.

so how much ram have you got in total on the host pls?
how much did you give to virtual machine?

VMWare is critical to me, it is the only thing that prevents me from upgrading my Ubuntu to 10.04 because I refuse to use VMWare 2.x, so today I gave Virtualbox another try.

Pfft! What a disappointment. It's still slow. Barely usable. That's too bad, because everything else about it is very good IMO.

Sticking to VMware-server-1.0.8 on Jaunty. It's old, but works well.

What a great contribution to a two year old topic!

VirtualBox isn't slow. Don't know what your issue is.

It is a valuable contribution. I tested Virtualbox about one year and a half ago and was unhapppy with the performance. Today I was wondering if it had gotten any better. I ran into this post and many old pages in Google. So I had to check for myself, waste the time downloading, configuring, testing etc. Now that I posted a recent comment, anyone who looks for the same information I was looking for today may run into my comment and not waste their time on it. This kind of thing should be updated every six months.

i always used virtualbox, never had any problems. I bought a new system, multicore, 8GB. I installed VirtualBox 3.2.4, and its very slow, unworkable. Please are there more people having this issues ?

Yes. All my Red Hat based (Fedora and CentOS) virtual machines on my Fedora 64 bit host are really slow. They are usable, but everything is much slower than in most of my other similar virtual machines running on the same system.

The host is an Athlon 64 3800+ single core with 4GB.

This is a known issue. I've seen many threads like this on different forums.

Lately, I've been finding the same thing. I didn't like VMware server 2.x, but recently learned that the later VMware player is like the old server 1.x--allowing you to install a virtual machine from CD and so on.

Did a probably useless benchmark of installing a basic FreeBSD system and running buildworld--VBox took 3 hours, VMware server took 2. On another machine also tried with qmeu-kvm which was also rather slow.

I agree that it's good to update these threads every few months, as all of them (VBox, VMware, KVM and so on) constantly improve and sometimes regress.

Funny, but I've switched to Virtualbox for the exact opposite reason, VMware server performance had degraded to the point where I could go get a cup of coffee between mouse clicks. Between that and the complete lack of interest by VMware in updating Server, I decided that switching was a much better idea.

I also had problems with vmware-server 2.x, however, I was favorably surprised by player--I hadn't planned to try it, but a friend kept raving about it.

I had the exact same problem (Fedora 16 very slow even with VM additions installed: sluggish mouse, bad reaction time, missed clicks).

The solution was to give sufficient video memory (I used 128 MB) and then install the proper kernel dependencies before installing the VM additions, namely

yum -y update kernel
yum -y install kernel-devel kernel-headers dkms gcc gcc-c++

1 members found this post helpful.

I gave up trying to install Centos 6.2 as a guest as it was simply too slow. Running VirtualBox on Kubuntu 11.10 (can't check version now) but it took a good 5 minutes to get to the intro screen.

The thing is, running VirtualBox from Windows is not a problem, at all. Running VirtualBox V4.1.8 in Windows XP.

1 members found this post helpful.

I've used VirtualBox pretty extensively for a few years, and have always been impressed with its performance and usability. However, my experience has always been with the same setup -- a Linux-based host (Gentoo and Fedora) and a Windows guest OS.

This evening I'm trying it the other way around, on a 6-core AMD box with the recommended 768Mb of memory allocated to the guest. The host OS is Windows 7, and the guest is Fedora 16. And as reported above, the performance is so slow, it's essentially unusable. The installer has been running for an hour and a half, and I'm not even past the point where it formats the disk. Single operations that normally complete instantaneously are taking many minutes to finish. At this rate it would probably be another 10-15 hours before the installation is complete.

Something is *seriously* wrong with VirtualBox, and it's apparently a longstanding problem. It isn't happening all the time, it isn't happening with every user. But in some cases, it just craps out.

1 members found this post helpful.

Change the chipset under System->Motherboard in the settings of your virtual machine to ICH9. The Intel chipset works correctly for Red Hat and its kids. CentOS 6.2 was running like a complete dog until I realized what the problem was. Now runs near real time like it should.

Cheers.
J

I have been using VirtualBox for a very long time. It has problems in Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, I installed it, configured it, and optimized it, to no end....It was excruciatingly slow. I didn't have this problem prior to 11.xx, I can not even fathom why. I have tried uninstalling, re-installing, and following a few links in google how to optimize it, to no avail. I am very disappointed as I really liked it and now that I have an awesomely strong laptop, I can't take advantage of it. Really sucks.

Thanks all,
Sorry to be a bummer,