9.1 AMD64 multitasking efficiency low

[Philipp-Joachim Ost]

CeDeROM wrote:
> I have found 9.1 to be far more less responsive than 9.0 and previous
> releases on my desktop. I have noted this slow down at 9.1-RC. I have
> AMD64 4GB RAM i3 CPU and when I simply run Chromium, VBox with Windows
> XP 64bit (1GB allocated) and VBox with Ubuntu 64bit (1GB allocated) my
> machine gets unresponsive - it does not even respond to ACPI shutdown,
> I need to kill it to get working again :-( I did not happen before.
> 
> I have also noted that VBox 4.2.6 is working far more slower and makes
> bigger impact on the whole host performance - sometimes I need to wait
> some seconds to get the machine response back, this happens especially
> at loading stage :-(

I  generally do not observe such a behaviour on my machine (AMD FX-6100,
8GB RAM) running  9.1-PRERELEASE amd64 from mid-november '12. The system
is ZFS-only and equipped with a single WDC disk.
I'm also running VBox 4.2.6 with Fedora Linux (64 bit) as guest; the
virtual machine has 1.5GB RAM allocated. There was and is no delay in
using the virtual machine.

Even under heavy load (load level > 20) the system is interactive, that
is, I can watch videos, surf the net, etc. without almost no hiccup.
Only if memory is really scarce and I'm copying a large file (~7.5GB)
the system becomes kind of slow, e.g. it takes some time to switch
between different applications.
Up to now, I didn't need to kill my machine to get it working again.

HTH,
Philipp