Having just installed openSUSE 13.2 in Virtual Box I am finding that it is running extremely slowly. It takes an age to boot up and clicking on anything - like starting an application - gives an extremely slow response. I have installed Virtual Box additions. Anyone got any ideas?
On 2015-08-18 04:16, Paolo R wrote:
>
> Having just installed openSUSE 13.2 in Virtual Box I am finding that it
> is running extremely slowly. It takes an age to boot up and clicking on
> anything - like starting an application - gives an extremely slow
> response. I have installed Virtual Box additions. Anyone got any ideas?
What flavour did you install? KDE? Gnome? Heavy graphics?
What is the host running? If Linux, do you have graphic acceleration
working?
How much RAM did you assign to the guest?
What CPU do you have? Does it have… what’s the name…? virtual
machine enhancement support? Sorry, that’s not the name, maybe some
other person will know.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
Hi: I’m running Virtual Box on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
Gui: is KDE
RAM Allocated to openSUSe: 4096 MB
Hardware Virtuaization is operating i.e. VT-x/AMD-V and Nested Paging
Processor: Intel Core i7-2670 @ 2.2GHz with 8 Gb RAM
openSUSE is completely unusable on my laptop. Apart from issues with trying to get updates it can take anything from 10-30 seconds to get a response from a mouse click.
I might try it in VMWare and see if that’s any better.I doubt whether my laptop’s spec is a problem.
On 2015-08-19 04:06, Paolo R wrote:
>
> openSUSE is completely unusable on my laptop. Apart from issues with
> trying to get updates it can take anything from 10-30 seconds to get a
> response from a mouse click.
>
> I might try it in VMWare and see if that’s any better.I doubt whether my
> laptop’s spec is a problem.
No, they aren’t.
I often create virtual machines with openSUSE with under a gigabyte of
ram, and they work reasonably well.
I would try another desktop, see it behaves differently. XFCE, for
instance. But if it boots slowly it must be an issue with the
virtualization.
Wait… your total ram is 8GiB, and you dedicated 4 to Linux? Decrease
it. Leave only 2 to Linux, even less. Try, see if it makes a difference.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
By a series of incremental steps I now have a responsive openSUSE/VirtualBox system.
The biggest single positive effect was using 4 cores (out of 8 on my laptop.)
Other actions:
System -> Motherboard: enabled IO APIC, memory 2048Mb
System -> Processor: 4 cores, execution cap 100%
Display -> Video memory: 128Mb. WARNING: I did experiment with 3D Acceleration but this caused a VB error
Storage: for both IDE and SATA controller, enabled ‘Use host I/O Cache’
I hope this might help others trying to use openSUSE in VirtualBox.
On 2015-08-19 08:06, Paolo R wrote:
>
> By a series of incremental steps I now have a responsive
> openSUSE/VirtualBox system.
>
> The biggest single positive effect was using 4 cores (out of 8 on my
I use a single core, and a much older machine. vmware player. Responds
fine. If you need 4 to get a response, something is wrong in your setup.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
If you’re installing openSUSE with default settings as a Guest, it will install KDE which generally means you should allocate at least 4GB RAM to that Guest. On a machine with less physical RAM installed this can be a problem… So for instance since you are running a Win7 HostOS, that means you should typically have very bare minimum (which might still be inadequate) 6GB physical RAM, recommend minimum 8GB RAM. And, with these recommendations it also means that you’re not running any heavy desktop apps on your Host… like Outlook/MSOffice, many browser windows open, etc.
Note that it also makes no difference if you configure a large Paging File on your Win7, because if your system starts swapping heavily you’ll still see lagging.
More than likely your current VBox Guest settings are less than 4GB RAM but you don’t need to re-install. You probably are configured with the VBox default for openSUSE which is very inadequate (I don’t remember what the exact number is). If you have enough physical RAM in your system, you can easily modify the setting in your Guest Settings before booting up the Guest, and your Guest should be fully booted within approx 2 minutes.
If you install a new Guest, I instead recommend you install openSUSE 13.2 (or any other current openSUSE) with a lightweight Desktop. XFCE is good if you ordinarily like Gnome. LXDE is a good substitute for KDE. With either of these two Desktops installed, you can comfortably allocate only 2GB of RAM for most common uses.
TSU
On 2015-08-19 18:06, tsu2 wrote:
> If you install a new Guest, I instead recommend you install openSUSE
> 13.2 (or any other current openSUSE) with a lightweight Desktop. XFCE is
> good if you ordinarily like Gnome. LXDE is a good substitute for KDE.
> With either of these two Desktops installed, you can comfortably
> allocate only 2GB of RAM for most common uses.
I’m this instant running two virtual guests at the same time. One is
Leap with Gnome, another is Tumbleweed with XFCE. Both have only 728M
ram. Using vmplayer. They run fine. The host is openSUSE 13.1.
I have not tried KDE recently (means years), so I can’t verify if it
requires more ram.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
Thanks for the comment. As I said in an earlier email, I now have openSUSE running with acceptable response times. As it happens I have 8GB RAM on my Windows host and originally allocated 4GB to the openSUSE guest. 2GB now seems fine.
Just as a comment. I’m running on a openSUSE13.2 host a openSUSE13.2 guest(to connect to work via vpn) with KDE on host and guest and I left the initial allocation of 1 CPU and 256Mb. Yes it’s slow if you want to open a browser and let’s say an office application) but for the terminal and remote desktop is working fine. I’m looking now at improving the response time for a browser in the same session and I will probably allocate 1-2Gb out of the 8Gb which I have and probably 2 cores out of I think 10 available. My point was that even KDE which is heavy can run on a minimal setting, albeit slow, but never failed).
Your “CPU core” setting is irrelevant.
That setting is **virtual **cores which only some very specialized software want to see but has nothing to do with real hardware CPU cores.
This can easily be verified.
Set your Guest to a single core/CPU.
Open top on your Linux Host or Task Manager or Resource Monitor on a Windows Host.
Do something very CPU intensive in your Guest (like transcoding)
View the distribution of CPU core load in top or whatever running on your Host.
TSU