Monday, June 27, 2011

less is more when it comes to VirtualBox CPUs

Below is a very non-scientific graph after measuring the start-up times of various applications with a stopwatch.  This was using a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine under VirtualBox 4.0.x. With dual CPUs, IO APIC emulation is turned on, causing a huge performance hit.

app startup time under virtualbox
app startup time under virtualbox

Moral of the story: run Windows XP under VirtualBox with one CPU and IO APIC turned off!

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