[Novalug] Tip on VirtualBox

[Jay Hart]

Jon,

It was me, and I'm glad you found a workable solution.

Jay

> At Saturday's tweakfest I was discussing with someone
> that VirtualBox (VB), even with an idle guest OS, consumes
> a lot of cpu cycles, typically 35-45% of a single cpu.
> Earlier, when I "googled" for solutions/reasons I found
> none.  But the discussion stimulated me to search again.
>
> I found some reports that on multi-core processors VB
> has a definite problem.  The work-around was to tweak
> the host OS's scheduler to limit the process to a
> single core (or cpu).  The linux command to accomplish
> this is taskset(1).  Taskset can be used to set the
> cpu affinity on a running process or to launch a
> process with the stated affinity.  Here are two
> examples (it can be done with a "mask" instead of
> the -c option -- man taskset).
>
> Limit process 8765 to cpu 1:
>
> 	taskset -c -p 1 8765
>
> Launch VB limited to cpu 0:
>
> 	taskset -c 0 /usr/bin/VirtualBox
>
> I've tried it on my Fedora system running WinXP as
> a guest.  Works great.  Of course, if your guest
> needs all your multiple cores, this is not a solution.
> But for my needs a single core is fine. and cpu usage
> has dropped from ~40% to ~4% when WinXP is idle.  My
> desktop icon to launch the guest is now:
>
>     taskset -c 0 /usr/bin/VBoxManage startvm mumsxp
>
> Hope someone else finds this useful.
>
> --
> Jon H. LaBadie                  jon at jgcomp.com
>  JG Computing
>  12027 Creekbend Drive		(703) 787-0884
>  Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)
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