dramatic speed improvement in vmware (virtualbox ?)

[didiergm]

Background: Over the w.e. my desktop machine and my laptop "died"; being a software developer that was Panic time;

Anyway, no time wasted, went out and bought a cheap Dual Core Athlon PC + 4GB + 500GB hdd to act as a temporary replacement while my machines get repaired; I Removed Win7  , grabbed a copy of PCLOS; installed in no time, full update, setup dual screen (a bit fiddly this time round) and proceeded with transferring most of old drives onto  the new machine so far so good; then I installed and started vmWare workstation using AMD-optimised kernel; then I opened one of my 'old'  vms running XP all fine bar the speed which drove me potty; I optimised vmware, defragmented Windows etc, still long pauses (several seconds for the system to come back avec closing the window) : on the verge of being useless or at least unfit for developemnt.

I went to the vmware setup dir and looked at the startup log to find that there was a criptic message abbout missing a system library : libaio, I installed it  rebooted and now both my vms are stunningly fast. much faster than my previous quad core; both vms running are snappy & hihgly responsive so I wanted to share that with you.

Didier

[Timothy]

Didier,

I have a Vaoi quad core that I run VirtualBox for some legacy WinXP applications.  I recently updated my kernel to 2.6.33.7-pclos3.a64 because of power control problems (sleep/hibernate/shutdown all broken). 

2.6.33.7-pclos3.a64 appears to have cured my power control issues.  But after installing the new kernel, WinXP in VirtualBox became UNUSABLY slow.  However, switching back to the default kernel (2.6.33.5-pclos1.bfs), VirtualBox runs normally.

I read your post, installed libaio1 from the repositories, and now VirtualBox is blazingly fast under both kernels.

Thanks for the tip!

Tim.

[MCP]

Didier,

I saw your post and the one by Timothy.  I didn't have any particular problem with speed in VBox but decided to install libaio1 anyway.  It appears that it has made some difference, making is faster still.  Can never be too fast in my book.

Thanks for the tip,
MCP