Extremely Poor Perfomance w/ Shared Folders - Mac OSX 10.6 Host/Windows 7 Pro 32-bit Guest

[Adam DiFrischia]

I've got an end-user with an issue running VirtualBox 3.0.12 on OS X 10.6.2, Windows 7 32-bit Guest. The performance when dealing with Shared Folders is appalling. I've seen a lot threads that pretty much say the same thing, so I'm going to try and give up as much information as possible. I'd like to assume this is due to the newness factor of Windows 7.

Guest Details:

1536MB RAM
2 vCPUs
VT-x/AMD-V: Enabled
Nested Paging: Enabled
ACPI: Enabled
Display: 12MB
3D Acceleration: Disabled
Hard Disk: SATA Port 0, Normal, 60GB
Audio: CoreAudio, ICH AC97
Adapter 1: Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop

I've tried using the /drivers/etc/hosts file fix that was posted for several Windows XP guests. While this does cut down on the level of waiting and freezing, it's still at a level that's unacceptable for this person's day-to-day work (editing documents, attaching pictures generated in OS X to e-mails in Outlook, presentation devleopment, etc.). I did some tests jockeying settings back and forth with the network adapters, hosts file, etc. 3 times each opening the file, averaged out. I then copied the file from the shared folder onto the Windows desktop and opened it there for a baseline native comparison. Keep in mind this is an 11KB Word Document, as well as the fact that these times do not include the initial Word startup lag. I also rebooted in between adding and removing the hosts fix. Chart is attached.

I've never seen performance this bad in a guest before. Obviously the closest to native performance are the numbers with no Networking enabled, but for an end-user this is not acceptable to have to constantly turn networking on and off to work with files.

[Adam DiFrischia]

VBox Log

[Adam DiFrischia]

VBox Log .1

[Adam DiFrischia]

VBox Log .2

[Adam DiFrischia]

VBox Log .3

[Adam DiFrischia]

VBox Shared Folder Metrics

[Adam DiFrischia]

I should mention the time in the charts are in seconds.

[sunlover]

This is the same problem as ticket 1728: ​http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1728

Please try the 'lmhosts' workaround mentioned in ​http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1728#comment:92