Poor performance of VirtualBox under Win10

We have a build system which, until a few weeks ago, was taking about 1.5 hours for a full build of each target device.

At some point, that’s been bumped up to about 3.5 hours which, because we build for about nine different targets, has increased our build time from fourteen hours to about thirty-two.

We think we’ve finally established where the issue lies. A VM running on my Win10 box (the guest is Ubuntu 16.04) was copied over to a Win7 box. The VM was totally unchanged in terms of its setup, what type of disks it ran on, and so on. The machine was also very similarly specced out (same CPU, disks, etc).

As an aside, I was originally running VirtualBox 5.x while the Win7 box had 6.0.12 but I don’t think that’s the issue since an upgrade to 6.0.14 on my box made no change. Even moving the VM disk across to an SSD on my box gave little relief, meaning it’s almost certainly CPU bound.

The Win7 box running the VM did each build in about 1.5 hours.

Then the only change we made to that box was an in-place upgrade to Win10 and, lo and behold, the builds are now also taking 3.5 hours each.

A little research shows that there are a few people having issues with VirtualBox/Win10 as both host and guest but the advice given (video memory increase, re-balancing of CPUs/memory between host and guest, enabling/disabling video acceleration, etc) doesn’t seem to fix anything.

We are mulling over a few ideas such as:

• running Ubuntu on bare metal but that obviously makes it harder to move VMs around;
• running these Ubuntu guests on top of Linux hosts so, assuming the issue is Win10, we get a performance improvement while still allowing VM mobility;
• sticking with Win10 but using VMWare Player rather than VirtualBox (currently testing to see if this is viable);
• reverting to Win7 for the build boxes, but I don’t think IT are going to be happy with that proposal (i.e., not a snowflake’s hope in hell of that being approved 🙂 ).

Does anyone have any other ideas on how to go forward?

VirtualBox is very slow in Windows 10

I had VirtualBox installed on Windows 8.1 and it was working correctly. I upgraded to Windows 10 and re-installed VirtualBox, but it’s very slow.

• CPU : Intel Core i5
• Graphic Card : Nvidia 740m
• 6 Gigabyte RAM
• 256 GB SSD Storage

Drivers are up to date. 3D Acceleration is enabled.

What’s the problem?

16 Answers 16

It seems you’re on a laptop, so tweaking Windows power options may be a solution:

So it turned out to be a simple problem, partly caused by selecting the wrong power plan. Make sure that the High power plan is selected when running virtual machines VirtualBox.

After some more experiments, I found that by raising the minimum processor speed when running on mains power raised the CPU speed. Setting it to 80% made the minimum speed 2GHz on mains power, which was fine for running the virtual machine.

To do this, go to Power Options in the Control Panel and next to the Power saver plan, click Change plan settings. On the next screen, click Change advanced power settings. Expand Processor power management, Minimum processor state, and set Plugged in to 80% or whatever value gives reasonable performance in the virtual machine.

I had the same problem today — found that the «Graphics Controller» (Display tab) had defaulted to VBoxSVGA. Clicking over all my VMs, it was the only one on that setting. So I changed it to VBoxVGA, and voila — no more lag! It was so bad, I’d see the display update in the VirtualBox Manager mini preview, so I’d click off the VM then click back and the display would update. Good as new now.

I noticed a significant boost in Windows speed after enabling 3D acceleration from the Display settings panel.

1) You might exclude from antivirus & Windows Defender:

Search Virus and Protection > . Settings > Add Exclusions > Add Folder -> C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox

2) Check the Execution cap . I use around 30-70%

CPU Execution cap limits the amount of time a host CPU spends to emulate a virtual CPU. The default setting is 100%, meaning that there is no limitation. A setting of 50% implies a single virtual CPU can use up to 50% of a single host CPU.

Make sure that you have the VirtualBox Guest Additions installed, which ensures that the virtualized OS can work better with the hardware exposed through the host.

More weird things with Windows 10 guest (after clean install), on two different hosts.

On one host with Windows 10 host, the VoxSVGA + 3D works acceptable.

On the other host with Linux Manajaro (last LTS kernel 5.x) host, the VBoxSVGA (with and without 3D accel) makes the guest to not reach desktop, freezes prior to dots moving, BSOD, etc.

On such other host with Linux Manajaro (last LTS kernel 5.x) host, the VMSVGA with 3D accel makes the guest to not reach desktop, freezes prior to dots moving, BSOD, etc.

On such other host with Linux Manajaro (last LTS kernel 5.x) host, the VMSVGA without 3D accel makes the guest to reach desktop, but so slow that it is unusable, more than half an hour to reach desktop, more than ten minutes to show windows menu after click, more than five minutes to show contextual desktop menu, near two hours to open explorer, near one hour and a half to open notepad, near 45 minutes to open cmd console window, typing the four characters of «CD \» took near two full minutes, listing shown was one character every four or five secons, etc. and near five hours to do a shutdown.

With a lot, lot of patience, i had tried to uninstall, reboot and re-install AddOns, that took a whole week, near 166 hours, but that did not help, still the same.

As i said Windows 10 is a clean install.

The weird thing is that such guest install was done on an Intel Windows 10 host and speed problems appear on an AMD Linux host.

If i install the guest on AMD Linux host it works acceptable, but if i take that guest to the Intel Windows host, then the guest has the exact same problems, BSOD or very slow, depending on (VBoxSVGA with/without 3D and VMSVGA with 3D = BSOD) vs (VMSVGA without 3D = very slow).

Very slow = A lot of minutes (>30 min) to just boot, some hours to do a clean power off, etc

BSOD = Not reach desktop, just freeze or BSOD and auto-reboot.

It happens only with Windows 10 guest, i had tried with and old WinXP guest i had and such worked perfectly on both hosts (i can move the WinXP guest form Intel to AMD back and forth without problems, but not the Win 10 guest).

I also had tested with default settings that VBox uses when creating the VM, with all sorts of combinations (PAE/NX, IO, cache, etc), the only thing that causes any difference on BSOD vs reach desktop is selecting VMSVGA without 3D, but hten that VM is too slow to be able to be used.

Both host have decent modern processor, 8GiB physical RAM (2GiB to guest).

And yes, i had tried with max guest video memory size, no help at all. Also 100%, 90% .. 50% of CPU did not help; guest with only 2 cores so host have plenty of cores extra (Intel is quad core no multi-threaded, AND has 32 cores with 64 threads).

This problems appear after VirtualBox change to 6.x from 5.x, but with 5.x no matter what video configuration i use the win 10 guest BSOD problem was allways appearing if i use the VM guest on AMD if installation was done in Intel and vice-versa, so at least with VBox 6.x i can reach desktop (with 5.x i can not) but it is unusable.

VirtualBox works extremely slow on Win10

I got W7x64 guest. While my host was also W7x64 -everything works fine. But when I’ve changed host OS to Win10x64 I got problems. Now my guest works extremely slow. How that could be fixed? I’ve already tried increasing memory and give my guest all cores — that doesnt help.

VirtualBox 5.1.32

4 Answers 4

I had similar issues as my host machine (OSX) was a bit wimpy. It is a dual core early 2009 Mac Mini with 8GB Ram.

A Win10 x64 guest was slow as hell. I changed the guest settings to:

• 1 CPU
• 3072MB RAM
• 192MB Video Memory
• 2D & 3D Video Acceleration enabled
• Use unscaled HiDPI output enabled

That made a big difference — I was stressing the host out with too much CPU and RAM allocated to the guest. It’s still a bit slow, but is a lot better.

Hope this helps.

How much RAM does your host have and how much RAM is allocated to your guest in VirtualBox? For example, if your system has 4GB RAM, you will always need minimally 2GB RAM for your host to properly run the virtual machine.

Windows 10 is known for not being efficient with RAM. A lot of background tasks (a lot more than Windows 7) require a heavy portion of your RAM. Spreading your RAM evenly over your host and your guest disregards the fact that Windows 10 needs a lot more RAM. If you don’t have enough RAM for your host, the VirtualBox application will run slower (which has nothing to do with your guest). Try to give your guest some less RAM (1GB if you have 4GB in total, 1GB or 2GB if you have 8GB in total, . ). You can do that at Settings->System and move the slider at base memory.

TL;DR: Decrease the allocated RAM for your guest in VirtualBox.

Fix Slow Performance of Windows 10 Guest in VirtualBox

VirtualBox is my virtualization software of choice. It is free and feature-rich, so all my virtual machines are created in VirtualBox. Starting with Windows 10 April 2018 Update (and its pre-release versions), I noticed very poor performance of Windows 10 guests in VirtualBox. Here is how I fixed it.

Let’s start with official Windows 10 system requirements, which are as follows.

Processor:	1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM:	1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
Hard disk space:	16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS
Graphics card:	DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
Display:	800×600

Now, let’s create a new Windows 10 machine in VirtualBox and see which settings it will use by default.

Click on the File — > New Machine to open the new machine wizard.

Select Windows 10 (32-bit or 64-bit) and fill in the machine name box.

By default, VirtualBox will dedicate 1 GB of RAM for a 32-bit Windows 10 machine, and 2 GB for its 64-bit version. In my case, it is a 64-bit instance.

The virtual hard drive will get 50 GB of disk space.

It is OK to use VDI as the hard drive image format. I am using a dynamically expanding virtual disk to save space on my real hard drive. However, using a pre-allocated (fixed size) disk image will speed up your guest OS a little.

Your virtual machine is now created. It fits the official system requirements, so everything should be fine.

However, after installing Windows 10 on such a virtual machine, you will face extremely poor performance in the guest OS. It will work slow as hell, making you wait for several minutes for simple action such as opening Settings or File Explorer.

Fix Slow Performance of Windows 10 Guest in VirtualBox

The secret is in the CPU configuration of the virtual machine. By default, it is set to single core.

While the official system requirements don’t mention CPU cores, it looks like Windows 10 needs at least a dual-core CPU to run smoothly. I recommend you to change the Processor parameter to half of your CPU cores. i.e. if your CPU is 8-core, set this parameter to 4.

Also, increasing RAM to 3 GB (3072 MB) allows the OS to work better. It is not really necessary, but it’s better to make this change if you have enough memory on the host hardware.

Now, start your Windows 10 virtual machine. You’ll notice the difference.

Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:

Share this post

About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

11 thoughts on “ Fix Slow Performance of Windows 10 Guest in VirtualBox ”

If you are using Hyper-V in Windows to set up a virtual machine you also need to change the CPU to more than one core before you start your installation.

Now if only there was a way to enable Fluent Design in Virtualbox… Unless there is?

It is enabled out of the box there. However, it has glitches.

Really? Fluent Design transparency or reveal effects have never worked for me in VirtualBox. Even with the VirtualBox extensions installed. Is there some setting I’m not aware of? I’ve been reading about this over at VirtualBox forums a while back and the consensus was that it doesn’t work because VirtualBox graphics drivers don’t support it.

Sorry, I was wrong.
I have managed to get the Fluent Design effects over rdesktop in Linux, but not in VirtualBox.
You are right, the driver doesn’t provide acceleration.

Now we have this:
Enable Windows 10 Fluent Design Acrylic Effects in VirtualBox
See the pic:

For me, these option were not sufficient !
Test with HDTUNE : HD (SSD) performance =

8GB/s. Ridiculous.
and very poor usage of HDD
I tried a lot of things, and finally replace CHIPSET PIX3 by ICH9
And HDTUNE displays now about 32 GB/s
Not very high for SSD disk, but globally, speed of my virtual machine becomes now 4 times greater.
Much more acceptable .

Thanks for the tip. I will try it right now!

I think I have finally found the answer. My Virtual box was perfect for some years and then suddenly started to hang badly, to a point it hardly worked. I have used every single option in various forums to get it working, to no avail. Just by chance I noticed by Avast software in the virtual box was also very slow loading, so decided to uninstall it. Immediately the virtual box started running again and is now back to normal. So give it a try and uninstall your virus software and see what happens.

I spent weeks trying to figure this all out. I tried every tip that I could find – messing with virtualbox settings, windows settings, etc. I actually solved my problem on accident. I noticed that on top of my windows 10 being sluggish its network times were also slow over a bridged network. In the settings for Windows 10 network there is an “advanced” area. I changed the setting from “Intel desktop” to “Intel Server” and it was like the fog had drifted away. Not only was my network speed much better the entire desktop was snappy. YMMV – my host is an enterprise-level box.

Thanks to the author and to those within the comments section, doing a combination seems to have helped speed my VM up a bit!