Frequent network stoppages/poor performance on VBox 3.1 running pkg image-update in guest

[Robert Krawitz]

Running VirtualBox 3.1.0/3.1.2 on OpenSUSE 11.1 (64 bit) with OpenSolaris (b126 or b128) guest.

If I run "pkg image-update -v" in the guest to upgrade to build 129, I get frequent errors as below. I'm using NAT networking. I've tried a variety of settings in the guest (enable/disable VT-x, for example) with no change in results. I've tried both the opensolaris.org and Sun internal repositories with the same result. What I observe is that package retrieval makes decent forward progress for a minute or so, and then hangs for quite a while with no network activity showing, then it makes more progress for a bit, and eventually the image update times out as below.

Downgrading to VirtualBox 3.0.12 fixed this. I then reinstalled 3.1.2 and it started happening again.

...
SUNWj6rt                               13/1692   551/59050  15.3/1200.7 


Errors were encountered while attempting to retrieve package or file data for
the requested operation.
Details follow:

1: Framework error: code: 28 reason: Operation too slow. Less than 1024 bytes/sec transfered the last 30 seconds
URL: 'http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/file/0/122ae0828e0fa356e5828926a58d536ecfbdf0c9'. (happened 3 times)
2: Framework error: code: 18 reason: transfer closed with 12526354 bytes remaining to read
URL: 'http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/file/0/122ae0828e0fa356e5828926a58d536ecfbdf0c9'.

[Robert Krawitz]

This is still happening with 3.1.4.

Interestingly, I find that if I run netstat -i the transfer immediately starts back up -- consistently.