HowTo: Speed up Shared Folder Access Time in VirtualBox with Windows Guest

If you are suffered by accessing shared folders too slow, try this:

1. if your vm is running Windows,
2. if your share folder name is like that : "\\vboxsvr\<share fodler>"
3. if you install windows in disk c of your vm
4. please modify c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
5. modify the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to "127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr"
6. reboot vm, and you can see there's a lot of improvement.

Made an incredible difference for me. FWIW

 

Interesting... I'd think that calling itself the vboxhost would break things. 127.0.0.1 should point only to the machine, IE, the virtual machine, and not the virtualbox host.

 

Have you tried it? It really cured my 'sluggishness' problem access my /home from XP. I don't understand why though....any explanation?

 

I don't have any sluggishness problems with my mapped drive, so I'm not about to break my hosts file I'm just talking from a networking perspective, it doesn't make sense.

 

PITA, for an FYI, this sluggishness seems to be a common complaint on the Ubuntu forums....with regard to my XP virtual machine hosts file, broken is as broken does Shared file access is dramatically improved for me. Please be so kind to explain; you're a coder and I'm not, I'm just trying learn something here I think we're missing something here.

 

127.0.0.1 is called the loopback address. When you say "vboxhost" should resolve to 127.0.0.1, that means that the virtual machine should look at itself when trying to find the drive. It may be because of the way that VirtualBox intercepts mapped drive accesses and such that this works, but in general, any time you access 127.x.x.x you are accessing only your own machine (ie, the virtual machine), and you can't get to anything else. That's the whole point of the loopback.

What may be different between our systems is that I have the Sun Virtualbox 3.0 version installed, not the open-source version.

 

Thanks for info....I have Jaunty 9.04 x64 and VB PUEL ed. 3.0.6.....man, all I know is the procedure above was being used on Ubuntu forums, and damned if it didn't make a world of difference I'll study that some when I get more time.....