Hello everyone,

 

I'm not sure where I should start troubleshooting. I decided today I wanted to add a  VM to Unraid and the only reason is to have a RetroArch or retro gaming PC remotely available.

 

The Unraid server is currently running on an AMD FX 8350 (8 Core, 8 Threads)  with 16GB of ram and I currently do not have an ssd as a cache drive- as it recently failed, so my entire server is currently made of hdd.

 

I have very bad performance when trying to create a VM.  I tried creating a Win 7 VM and after 4 hours abandoned it while it was still at the first stage. I was successful in creating an Endeavour VM  (KDE Plasma) - but only after letting the install run all night. Endevour runs sluggish and it takes about 2 to 3 seconds for response after clicking on anything. I installed Conky and never saw the system rise above 3% CPU (with 6 of 8  cores allotted) or 1.5G of Ram with 8G allotted.

 

I tried installing Lubuntu as a test - but it seems to hang at about 13%. and has not finished installing even hours later.  I tried these VM's set for "auto" drive selection and have also tried selecting a specific drive with no difference.  Also Checking Unraid STATS tab - the processor has never risen above 4% regardless of install and RAM sometimes seems to be used a bit but never full potential.  Also i noticed if I click on VMS tab Unraid just sits there with the thinking symbol forever and never loads the list of VM's  while a VM is being is installed or updated- also with the processor and RAM not loading up..  

 

I know my server doesn't have the best hardware performance wise but I definitely don't think its so slow it should take hours to install a lightweight Linux distro. What should I look at, are there any logs I can provide you that would help? 

 

Thanks!

vms on hdds are not the best but I think you already noticed.

I'm running a linux vm on a vdisk on a hdd on a non unraid build and recently I got some issues with performance, well...in real it was unusable...firefox wasn't launching, gedit stuck, updates took forever..

I had some luck, i.e. the vm is now usable, by changing vm.dirty_background_ratio and vm.dirty_ratio

The symptom is that you have in your log something like: task xxxx:xxxx blocked for more than 120 seconds --> this is i/o issue

Values depend on the build, so you need to experiment yourself.

Unraid should have a plugin for this (tips and tweaks by user dlandon).