CentOS 6 very slow with Vagrant

I use Vagrant to test almost everything. But since I upgraded to VirtuabBox 4.2.x and CentOS 6 as guess OS, I had the impression that everything was slower… and I get use to it…

But this week-end while preparing selinux policies for Percona XtraDB Cluster, I noticed that it was really slow…. really really very very slooooow :’-(

And I found the reason ! I first tried to add some kernel parameters like :

noacpi 
noapic 
divider=10 
notsc

But that didn’t help.

Then I just enabled IO APIC on the VM’s configuration and it worked much faster ! The boot of the machine was faster and in my case loading selinux policies too !

Have a look to the difference:

Without IO APIC:

[root@node2 ~]# time semodule -i percona-xtradb-cluster-full.pp

real	6m3.646s
user	1m34.430s
sys	3m42.805s

With IO APIC:

[root@node2 ~]# time semodule -i percona-xtradb-cluster-full.pp

real	0m14.611s
user	0m13.829s
sys	0m0.769s

To enable IO APIC from Vagrant, these are the parameters to use in your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "256", "--ioapic", "on"]