VirtualBox - slow access to shared folders in Windows XP guest

[fraxinus]

I work as a typesetter and graphic designer and must use Adobe's and Corel's products. For some years I ran a virtual XP install using VMWare Server and this worked very well indeed. When this app stopped functioning fully on PCLinuxOS during the winter, I switched to VirtualBox. I have now acclimatised to this and it is working reasonably well - in fact, seamless mode is nice!

However, I rely on a shared folder to access text files and graphics on my Windows partition, and I am finding that some operations are cripplingly slow. For example, linking a high resolution graphic file to an InDesign document often takes 30 seconds or more.

I have done some googling and found that this is a known issue for some users. I found the advice on this website was cited on many websites and blogs, but sadly it hasn't helped me.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/linux-compatibility-software/421811-howto-speed-up-shared-folder-access-time-virtualbox-windows-guest.html

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?

[kjpetrie]

Shared folders are slow because they are a form of virtual networking and data has to be transmitted between the virtual and host machines just as it would over a real network.

I suspect the speed increase in that suggestion above is because the shared folders are no longer being used, but a local copy has been created on the vm!

Have you tried sharing a real host partition with the guest (see chapter 9.10 of the VBox manual)? If you keep the folders you need to share on this real partition you should have immediate access to them in both machines.

[fraxinus]

Have you tried sharing a real host partition with the guest (see chapter 9.10 of the VBox manual)? If you keep the folders you need to share on this real partition you should have immediate access to them in both machines.

Thank you for your suggestion. I shall try this sometime. Interestingly, I have noticed that this performance lag is not as bad when I am working with files within Samba shares on my NAS, so I could also look at reconfiguring my work to take advantage of this.

[kjpetrie]

Just a quick thought. It's probably not a good idea to have such a partition mounted read-write in both machines at the same time, as each OS will think it has sole control and they might fight over your data!