Confirmed: Virtual Box may affect FFXIFollow

I'd been experiencing some very, very faint lag for some time now. It wasn't really noticeable unless I was staring at my character; it was a microsecond freeze once a second, almost like the old HID device bug but nowhere near as bad.

It's been bothering me since it started, like an itch I couldn't quite scratch.

A bit of research led me to an FFXIAH thread about similar issues, and the culprit has been pinned down to Oracle's Virtual Box.

As soon as I uninstalled VB and BOINC, tada, the lag stopped completely and FFXI is running at 29.4 FPS, steady as she goes. (BOINC is the application that used VB; without VB there was no point in having BOINC. It's used to run science experiments, in my case the Test4Theory LHC@Home program.)

So if you have unexplained micro freezing in FFXI or any other game and you're got Virtual Box installed, you can try installing it to see if it improves performance.

In my case, VB was controlled by BOINC. BOINC is supposed to "suspend" the VB Linux machine used for computations whenever the system is in use. However, even when computing was suspended, or the BOINC client was completely unloaded, I still had the almost imperceptible twitching effect. The culprit is apparently the networking service of VB, not the graphics. BOINC likes to poke its data center via VB every second or so, even when the BOINC client isn't actually loaded. The services are still running in the background...

Of course, we all know that FFXI is twitchy about having its networking interrupted and tends to be affected by the oddest things on a system.

Simply unloading the BOINC client didn't fix it. I had to manually kill all the VB services and processes from the taskbar.

Eeeee..... I don't know. I'll reboot and check and see if the BIOS has such a setting.

If your bios doesn't have such an option, your processor doesn't support hardware virtualization most likely. In which case you are going to be using software virtualizzation rendering, and potentially having issues.

Yeah, but at least now you know how to fix it, so is learning experiance!