Booting Windows7 boot in less than 10 seconds inside VirtualBox

How did I do that? Well, it's a stock Windows 7 installation on VirtualBox for Linux. However, after installation, I've cached the whole hard disk image into RAM, so VirtualBox fetches everything from there instead from the "slow" Hard Disk. In fact, when cached, the maximum transfer is about 6.7GB/s:

dd if=NewHardDisk1.vdi of=/dev/null bs=1M
7409+1 records in
7409+1 records out
7768940544 bytes (7,8 GB) copied, 1,15404 s, 6,7 GB/s

So what happens here? Well, Linux uses the "free" amount of memory of your box to cache files. In my case, I got 12GB RAM, and the VirtualBox image was 8 GB, so I simply forced Linux to read the whole image (outputting it to /dev/null is intented), which put the image into cache. When I started VirtualBox, Linux read the cached image from memory, achieving a 10-second boot.

With a decent SSD, I achieve similar timings when booting Win7 (without VirtualBox), so I guess that even with faster RAM transfers and caching, boot time is now somewhat limited to the CPU performance and not the HDD performance anymore.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• VirtualBox
• Windows
• fast
• boot

[medibosanac]

Windows may turn out to be better than Mac after all.... or will it?

[alek202]

@medibosanac I have no idea, however, I also don't believe in "better" or "worse" operating systems. I am using Windows and Linux (Debian/Gentoo) side by side, depending on which task I need to do.

[phrizno]

Dude! Stop coming on the net fooling people into believing shit like this!!!!!!!!!!XD

[alek202]

@phrizno This "shit" is perfectly documented. Read the video description and the comments.

[StealthWar95]

@KopierRecht 98? I definitely wouldn't say that. I could argue XP as being the best still. But in my opinion Windows 7 is the best. It has the NTFS, it's fast, just as stable as XP. Windows 98 isn't any of those.

[KopierRecht]

The best Windows was and still is, 98, and I`m using it by an AMD Duron, which is quite fast!

[lillee1995]

@mclmatty Haven't you heard of non-volatile (NV) RAM?

[ryley92]

@mclmatty actually you can install windows very easily to your ram, you just have to get a program that partitions your ram. once you do this, you can partition a part of your ram to function as a hard drive. dumbass