How To: Fix (Workaround, really) VirtualBox High CPU Load with Ubuntu 9.10 Host
Updated to Karmic the other day, and all is well and good with the world, but VirtualBox is determined to use a heap of CPU time even when the guest OS is idling. This sucks, and from what I've read is related to CPU affinity. I tried changing the affinity from 3 down to 1 with sudo taskset -p 1 31540 from the terminal, where 31540 was the PID (Process ID) of VirtualBox at the time - and did it work? Um, no... After some further reading I found a quirky, but totally working fix workaround: - Create a new virtual machine, call it "Dummy" or something - Assign it as little resources as you can, like 4MB RAM, use a 10MB HD image etc - Start this dummy virtual machine, skipping any virtual hard drive formatting - That's it! Just leave the dummy machine running at the screen saying "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted" With the dummy machine running, VirtualBox sorts out its own processor affinity properly, and the CPU usage of your actual VM guest drops waaaaaaay down and becomes snappy &
More
Support this project and others with 1-click micro-donations
