I’m currently in the process of building my source repository at home – after well over a decade of neglect i’m importing everything into SVN and organising my little spike projects from various languages, environments, project, you name it.

In any event, my development machine is a virtualised Windows XP running on a Windows XP host (connected using NAT) with VirtualBox. My laptop has a direct cross-over cable connecting it to my server, so the throughput should be at best 100Mbps. When importing content into the repos, i was concerned by how slow the import felt to take. It was transferring 1MB in about 30-40 seconds, which by all right should have been virtually instant.

Fortunately I was able to find the program iperf which runs on both Linux and Windows. Set-up the server on linux and connected to it from the windows client and was shocked to learn I was achieving (get this) less than 90kbps.

Yes, jaw-drop and all that.

I found these two tickets on the VirtualBox support site which identify it as a limitation of running vbox under NAT, which if you ask me is pretty silly considering i can’t run bridged networking over WiFi.

not    happy    jan.