hi everyone,

i have a core i3 laptop running debian x86_64. my entire hardisk is encryped for security(i travel a lot).
im taking a oracle SQL class and oracle database 11g only packages for RPM. 10g packages for DEB but 32 bit only! i use virtual box to virtualize CentOS and im experiencing terrible performance. at first i thought " this i3 sucks!!!" so i was thinking about returning my new laptop for something with an i5 but the cpu can scale and the system monitor shows the cpu taking it easy so im thinking the bottleneck is due to my HDD being encrypted. any thoughts? work arounds?

i could use alien to convert between package formats but i know its experimental.

does anybody have experiece with alien?

i guess i could just use mysql.

what do u think?

I doubt the encryption is the issue. That tends to show up in processing rather than disk access. I'd guess crummy hard drive speeds or maybe ram/swap issue?

I guess it can't hurt to test it your way. Make a spare install that isn't encrypted if you can and then see how it runs.

I run corporate encrypted disks on MS and it doesn't seem to affect the speeds at all that I can see. (core i5 however)

well there's plenty o swap (4GB). i encrypted the entire disk, so do u know if its safe to resize the partition?

I meant the combination of ram and swap. If ram were too low then swap gets used and that would slow it all down.

jefro, you are correct sir. encryption has nothing to do with the performance of the virtual machine. i ran virtual box on an unencrypted partition and it performed exactly like the the encrypted partition.

i've decided to use openSUSE and found that YaST rocks! so now i can install the oracle .rpm package.

thanks for your help!

OK, thanks for the report.