Optimizing Slow VirtualBox VMs

Question

I am running two VirtualBox VMs on a host laptop. All parties are running 32-bit Ubunutu 15.10.

The host has 1.9 GB RAM to share between itself and its guests and a Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50 GHz x 2 as a processor.

Needless to say I'm stretched pretty thin. Currently I'm allocating 512 MB RAM for each VM, reserving the rest for the host. The goal is to set one VM as a squid3 proxy server and the other as a client and pass small messages across. The VMs run very slow. It'd be great to better optimize them!

What would be the best utilization of resources? Are there any more lightweight ubuntu flavors that I can use in VirtualBox that play nice with squid3?

Here I summarized some tweaks you can try out to improve performance: http://askubuntu.com/a/289758/3940 — Takkat, Mar 22 '16 at 09:41

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 23 '16 at 08:08

1

If you are proficient in the console just Ubuntu Server in the VMs. There is no desktop environment, GUI or graphical installation by default, just the bare console, but it will run comfortably even with 265 MB of RAM.

answered Mar 23 '16 at 08:08

Javier Rivera

35,153

Thanks @Javier Rivera I will try that. Would Ubuntu Server be able to be used in the client VM? – Stan Mar 23 '16 at 14:53
If you are planning to run a full-featured browser in the client no. You will need some kind of GUI, Lubuntu is the lighter Ubuntu version with GUI included that I know. – Javier Rivera Mar 23 '16 at 16:01
I installed Ubuntu server and Lubuntu for each respective VM. Works much better than before! – Stan Mar 29 '16 at 00:53

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 19 '17 at 10:34

0

As a GUI you can always start an X server instance from your console-based Linux VMs. After you have logged in to a virtual console, you can start a graphical virtual console with:

startx -- :1

edited Sep 19 '17 at 10:34

karel

114,770

answered Sep 19 '17 at 08:16

Terence Agius

1
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Optimizing Slow VirtualBox VMs

2 Answers2