Fix High Guest CPU Utilization in VirtualBox by disabling Nested Paging
Posted
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 3:16 PM
by
CoreyRoth
When I got my new laptop, I had a ton of issues with high guest CPU utilization in recent versions of Orcale VirtualBox. It turns out I wasn’t alone with this situation seeing as how many comments I had on my previous post. We all tried a lot of different things with varying degrees of success. Personally, my work around was to go all the way back to version 3.0.12. It worked alright, but things could be better. Luckily, someone by the name of EdwardW came through for all of us and discovered that disabling Nested Paging seems to correct the issue. I tried it myself and have been running for over a day with various virtual machines and they are performing great. I only know Edward by his handle EdwardW, but we are all thankful for his diligence in finding a solution to our issue. He even claimed to have it working well with multiple virtual CPUs.
If you’re not familiar with this setting. Shut down your virtual machine so that you can edit the settings. Then go to the system tab, click on Acceleration and then uncheck the Enable Nested Paging checkbox. Click OK and start the virtual machine up and you should quickly notice some performance improvements.
It seems to work great for me so far. I was quick to pronounce a victory last time, but things appear to be running faster than ever now. Give it a try for yourself. The CPU utilization was even decent when I had a search crawl running.
The strange thing about all of this is that my previous laptop did not have this issue. I now suspect it is likely to have something to do with newer processors such as the i5 and i7. I could be wrong, but it certainly seems like the case for me. Is performance so good now that I can run FAST Search? Well, I wouldn’t say that, but it is better. Give it a try for yourself and let us know how it works.