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I use Debian 7.3 (Wheezy) with the default GNOME 3 desktop and run VirtualBox to have a Windows 8.1 guest. My host has 16GB RAM and a Core i7 CPU with 8 processor cores.

When I start the Windows 8.1 guest (which has 8 GB RAM and 4 cores), the performance of all applications, even on the host, gets very bad and all 8 cores are fully used, even when the VM only gets 4.

I looked in the processes list, and saw gnome-shell having much more CPU in use: it takes 360% of CPU, the VirtualBox process only 16%. While the VM is powering on, gnome-shell has 5.2GB of memory and the VirtualBox process 8.2GB. After a while the memory of gnome-shell decreases to about 400MB, but the CPU usage of gnome-shell stays; VirtualBox even goes down to only 8%.

I don't think this is normal, and would like to know if there is any way to prevent it.

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3 Answers 3

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We've found numerous problems with the 4.3.x series of VirtualBox. eg. running with multiple virtual cores causes problems with certain distros such as CentOS 6.

We've found the last of the 4.2.x series to be very solid. Try your Windows 8 guest in 4.2.22 - the old versions can be found on the virtualbox.org website.

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If you are working in a VM environment you should activate graphics acceleration (like 3D):
VirtualBox “Settings” window, “Display” panel
Gnome3 is not a light weight interface.

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    While this may answer the question, it would be a better answer if you could provide some explanation why it does so, and provide instructions on how to enable the graphics acceleration.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 17:18
  • You appear to have created two separate accounts.  Please go to the Contact page and select ‘‘I need to merge user profiles’’.
    – Scott - Слава Україні
    Commented Dec 23, 2017 at 20:18
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Actually I found that turning OFF 3D acceleration cleared up this problem. I had turned it on after reading an article about boosting performance of Ubuntu in a VM. What I saw after doing this was that after about 20 minutes (sometimes less, the UI was painfully slow. Looking at the Linux performance monitor, I could see Gnome using 80+ percent CPU!

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