[merrickread]

We're in the process of harmonizing our entire team (9) to use Vagrant in a VirtualBox. For the most part it works, but we run into issues regarding VB memory consumption crashing machines. Minimum 8gb ram machine.

Do you have any advice on how to keep the memory footprint low?

[brobinson]

Are you using 5.1.x? It had a ton of performance improvements over 5.0.x and earlier.

I regularly run 30-40 VMs at once on my dev server at work (40 cpus, 384gb ram), and I haven't had any problems like this there or at home...

[merrickread]

Amazing, we are using 5.0.x I'll see if that helps. Thank you!

[brobinson]

Another random thing I just remembered: if you're doing work in the VMs that is heavy on network I/O, try turning GRO off. We saw a big performance increase by doing this: https://github.com/contiv/volplugin/blob/master/Vagrantfile#...

[brobinson]

One other thing: VirtualBox 5.1 is only supported by Vagrant 1.8.5 and newer, but 1.8.5 has a 100% showstopper bug where the SSH key inserted into the VM is not chmod'd correctly and OpenSSH refuses to look at it. Use 1.8.6 or newer instead.