Painfully slow Windows 10 on Virtualbox

Question

Although I'm running Virtualbox on a Mac, I thought I'm probably more likely to get answers on this forum for this sort of issue rather than the Apple one.

I have downloaded a Windows 10 virtual machine from the MS site: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/

But I'm finding the slowness is making it unusable on my machine, if I click anything I have to wait about 10-20 seconds to see the result.

My Mac is quite old, but I am at least able to run High Sierra without issues, here is the spec if that helps:

• iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2009)
• 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 12 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400 256 MB

I have allocated 2048MB memory to the virtual machine (as is the default) but also tried with 4096 and had the same problem.

I'm running it using the .vmdk file provided by Microsoft, which is currently saved on my desktop as I couldn't get it to work from the VirtualBox VMs folder on my Mac (perhaps that is an unrelated issue though?).

Solution 1

I know your machine is technically above minimum spec for Windows 10*, but as you're running it in a VM rather than natively you can expect it to run considerably slower.

Windows 10, even more than High Sierra, is not designed to run from an old-style spinning hard drive, but from SSD.

You may be able to squeeze a little more performance out of it if you run it in Boot Camp [though you'd have to install Win7 & get to 10 via an in-place update] but you are really never going to see comfortable operating speeds on that hardware.

In a VM, you will achieve maximum performance in the VM itself [at slight cost to the host OS] by allocating the same number of processors as your CPU physically possesses. This will allow your host to actually operate in the HT cores & the VM to grab the primary thread in each core. [I've no idea how that works technically, but empirically that seems to be the case when watching Activity Monitor's CPU display.]

*Microsoft, btw, when quoting min spec, fails to recognise that drivers may no longer be avalibale for the hardware. Your GPU, for instance has no Win10 support from NVidia. It was legacied years ago.

Solution 2

Whilst this post is quite specific to your Mac and the confirmed answer is that your hardware is under spec, it is the main general search result when attempting to resolve Windows 10 performance on VirtualBox on Mac.

I have found this to be an issue on my 2018 MacBook Pro (2.7Ghz quad core i7, 16GB RAM) when using the VirtualBox console to interact with the VM. The VM is not usable even when running no applications on the host and giving the VM most the resources.

The solution I have found is to run the VM headless in VirtualBox and access the VM using RDP (Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac). In this configuration the VM runs seamlessly when given moderate resources (2 cores and 6GB RAM).

Comments

[Admin]

VirtualBox uses the .vdi extension by default when creating a new VM, because it's proprietary to Oracle and is fully supported, even in case of backward compatibility, by all VirtualBox versions across all supported platforms. This said, the best way to make another VM format work in VB is to import the machine via the Import VM wizard. Allocating a lot of RAM is one thing, but you need a lot of CPU too (at least one core fully devoted to your VM), and hardware acceleration / 3D acceleration should be enabled too.

[Malakai]

I think predominantly hardware issue (to be more specific CPU cores and GPU). As far as I am concerned, virtual box allows to allocate resources for a particular VMs. While doing so wisely, you have to take in mind, that host machine requires resources too and its prioritized over VM. If you allocate too much resources for VM there is a chance to host freeze all the time. Recap: If I were you, I wouldn't experiment with VMs due to lack of computing resources. I would proceed with Bootcamp option.

[jurez]

I don't think this could explain such a drastic slowdown. What you are describing could amount for slowdown of, say, 10-30%. Waiting 10s for a mouse click is in the range of 100000%.

[Tetsujin]

@jurez - Not if you actually examine what the OP is doing. Win10 won't run properly in 2GB anyway, as it will spend more time paging than doing anything else. Add to that, the Mac is not qualified to run the macOS that's already been forced onto it & it's running from an HD on an OS designed to run from SSD. I'm surprised it runs at all. iMacs with HDs are staggeringly slow anyway, even the new ones.

[Brecht Machiels]

Accessing the Windows 10 VM thought RDP (on localhost) is indeed much faster. Unfortunately, there are numerous display artifacts still making this unuseable. VirtualBox seems to be too unreliable to run a Windows 10 VM on macOS these days.