Comments on: How To: Fix (Workaround, really) VirtualBox High CPU Load with Ubuntu 9.10 Host

By: Safey

Safey — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:27:17 +0000

Try running sudo kill STOP pid to squeeze out more CPU from the dummy.

By: r3dux

r3dux — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:27:59 +0000

Think I’ve cracked it – check out the update to the article

By: r3dux

r3dux — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:02:38 +0000

Created a new virtual XP guest in VirtualBox 3.12, disabled all swapfile and indexing in the guest, minimised the number of running services, and set the virtual Hard Disk to run from a physically different disk in SATA mode (guide here) – then with the guest using a single CPU of the 2 available, ~~the guest cpu usage ticks over between 1-2%, so no need for the dummy guest anymore. Nice~~

~~Not tried using both CPUs yet – don’t really need to..~~

Update: Noticed the CPU usage was waaaay up again when the XP guest was idling, tried letting the guest use both CPUs (and rebooting twice to be sure) – result was even higher CPU usage. Back to a single CPU and using the dummy machine gets CPU as low as I’m able, but it’s by no means perfect. This is starting to irk me. It’s irksome.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:31:14 +0000

Nice fix. Thank you. You saved me from a big headache and you contributed to energy saving:)

By: r3dux

r3dux — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:15:26 +0000

Finally bit the bullet and installed a non-repo version from the Sun website (3.1.2) – and ~~as promised, setting the virtual box to use both physical CPUs has it running with low CPU usage. Good stuff.~~

No good, no dice, no joy… CPU usage is still really high. Have dropped back to using a single CPU for my main XP guest and running the dummy box to keep CPU hogging down.

I’ve tried disabling virtual memory in the XP guest, I’ve moved the virtual hard-disk over from IDE to SATA controllers (which I’ll post about soon) to try to improve the speed and lower CPU usage, I’ve lowered my linux host swappiness to 0 as with VirtualBox running linux was getting really swap-happy (think 500MB+) when I still had about a GB of RAM free…

I’m installing another version of XP now to see if something’s just got mangled on the guest or if VB really is acting up. Will post results as I get ‘em…

By: baba

baba — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:43:07 +0000

Same problem on Ubuntu 9.04, workaround work too

Thanks a lot.

Baba

By: r3dux

r3dux — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:03:16 +0000

Hey nickg,

The current version of VB in the Karmic repo’s is 3.0.12 – and if I go grab the freshest build I’ll have to manually install each update so I’m holding off for now (laziness, I know ) but I’ll definitely give your tip a whirl when the next version hits, as I’ve got my vboxen running on a single CPU out of the 2 physical ones on the core 2 duo to avoid them hogging resources…

Cheers for your input!

r3dux

By: nickg

nickg — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:22:57 +0000

Hi,

At least using virtualbox 3.1 and ubuntu 9.10, I was able to fix the high CPU load by matching the “virtual CPUs” with the actual CPU (I have 2-core laptop). Which I think beats running another VBOX.

enjoy!

–nickg

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:49:41 +0000

Had a bunch of problems after upgrading to Karmic and also this annoying problem with
Virtualbox.

But the above “fix”/workaround actually works so thanks!