Comments on: VirtualBox High CPU Usage Problem Solved

By: Fani

Fani — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:43:48 +0000

Awesome.. This helped tremendously. I went from ~55 – 90% CPU usage and constant load avg of nearly 1 on a dual-core machine to like max 20% cpu usage by virtualbox and load avg of nearly 0 on the linux host OS.

Amazing. This most likely has to do with a bug in VirtualBox wrt to cpu affinity. I have one cpu enabled out of 2.

By: Vasilis

Vasilis — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:51:05 +0000

Hey dude! Nice hack!

I can’t say it solved my CPU problem completely like for others here, but it def helped a lot! My CPU usage was about 70% and with the dummy guest its now down to 20% which makes life a bit easier.

Mac OS X 10.6 (Host) – CentOS 5.4 (Guest)

Thanks!

By: xin44

xin44 — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:02:46 +0000

You’re a great guy !
Solved my 100% cpu problem
seven 64 ultimate host – centos 2.6.18 kernel guest

thanks a lot !

By: Ant

Ant — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:15:15 +0000

yep, taskset didnt help at all, but a headless 4mb ram guest with no boot disk, in a failed to boot state does. Thanks for the post! This was on centos 5

VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.4_57640_rhel5-1

Linux vms01.internal 2.6.18-164.2.1.el5PAE #1 SMP Wed Sep 30 13:32:13 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3110 @ 3.00GHz

By: Idle VMs Hog CPU | Travis Vroman's CS460 Capstone: Guided Tour App

Idle VMs Hog CPU | Travis Vroman's CS460 Capstone: Guided Tour App — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:59:38 +0000

[...] seems ridiculous to have an idle VM consume 50% of my CPU cycles. According to this page, the solution is two idle [...]

By: Marton

Marton — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:30:38 +0000

I solved the issue by:
- changing my Windows XP installation to single core (using HALu: http://www.hardware.info/en-US/news/ym2cmZqYwp2a/Problems_updating_to_a_dualcore_CPU_Not_anymore/)
- shutdown Windows XP
- change the number of processors in VirtualBox from 2 to 1

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:45:51 +0000

Amazing, that fix works!

I tried setting the processor affinity of the virtualbox processes to one CPU, but it doesn’t make a difference. As soon as I started up a “dummy” guest instance… CPU goes to almost 0%

By: Remiz

Remiz — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:06:29 +0000

Thanks man, I found a lot of posts about the subject but only your fix my problem… Also I’m too lazy and Linux noob to rebuild my kernel. So it’s a quick and dirty fix that works great

By: Jent

Jent — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:42:13 +0000

The problem you described here is actually due to a bug in virtual box that has to do with the CPU affinity. In other words virtual box does not like switching between multiple cores.

By starting a second virtual box instance you are basically doing the same thing as just setting the CPU affinity for the process. If you are running virtual box from a GNU/Linux host, you can use taskset to set the CPU affinity.

By: Shantanu Goel

Shantanu Goel — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:47:10 +0000

wow, thanks loomsen. That’s an interesting piece of info. It is interesting in two regards. First I didn’t know that laptop manufacturers can have such a major oversight and second that I thought undervolting was only possible through BIOS. I’ll definitely try it out. Thanks once again.