How to improve Samba performance on VirtualBox machine?
- by ColinM
I am running a Windows 7 64bit host and Ubuntu 9.04 32bit guest inside of VirtualBox 4.0.0 on a laptop which has internet connectivity via Wifi. The main use is writing code for which I use Netbeans. My dev environment is hte virtual machine and I use Samba on the VM to share the code directory so that I can use Netbeans on the host as my IDE. Unfortunately Netbeans does a lot of disk access and due to the poor Samba performance it makes the IDE hardly usable. How can I improve performance of the Samba share? On my desktop it isn't so bad but I don't know what the difference would be since they are similar setups (Win 7 hosts, cloned guests, SSDs, Vbox guests using SATA in AHCI mode, etc..).
With Bridged networking is the performance between the host and guest limited by the physical hardware (Intel 6200 AGN on laptop)? I switched to Host-only and it didn't seem to improve performance at all.
To clarify bad performance, I used 7zip to zip a project directory and got 19kbs to 500kbs depending on the size of the files being zipped. On my desktop it was in the ~10mbs range.
Any tips for VirtualBox/Samba configuration to get improve the performance? I am using Samba 3.3.2. Hopefully Samba with SMB2 support will be released soon..