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I am on a Mac laptop (MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) i7 / 32GB RAM) running Win10 in VirtualBox. I have noticed a degradation in performance of the VM when the VirtualBox VM window is not the focused window on the Mac. To be clear, this happens when I switch to another desktop, not just when the screen times-out, etc.

The slowdown doesn't happen immediately; it seems to be a gradual thing. The longer the VM window is not the focused window, the slower the VM will run. Network calls will begin to fail in Windows. Keyboard and mouse events will miss or replay too many times. Switching back to the VM window will immediately boost it back to normal.

This is primarily annoying because I generally access the VM via RDP from another machine. So, I have to keep babying the mac, keeping the machine next to me, keeping the VM fullscreen, moving the mouse around periodically. As long as I do this, everything works fine.

I am guessing this is some sort of power-saving feature on the mac; although, it happens even when plugged in. The VM has 4GB RAM. Closing other processes on the mac does not help, so I don't believe the mac is running out of resources.

How do I get the mac to respect that the app is currently in-use, even though it doesn't think so, or how do I get it to run full blast at all times?

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  • This is likely to be VB itself. I run Windows 24/7 backgrounded on an old Mac Pro with zero issues… on Parallels. VMWare Fusion is free for personal use, maybe try that if you don’t want to spend on Parallels.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 23:09
  • Did you install Virtual Box Guest Extensions in the Guest Machine? Try that and see.
    – anon
    Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 23:35
  • @John guest extensions are installed
    – quitstalin
    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 15:03
  • Did the VM speed up?
    – anon
    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 16:18
  • I meant they were always installed from the beginning
    – quitstalin
    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 16:56

2 Answers 2

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Moving all apps to the same virtual desktop (and nothing full screen) seems to alleviate the symptoms; not ideal, but better. I'll wait to see if there are any other ideas.

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    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 20:52
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Just ran into the same issue, after a bit of experimenting I found out that running the VM in headless mode fixes this issue. I suppose because in this mode there is never going to be a concept of focusing the VM window, hence it runs at full speed all the time.

enter image description here

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