Very slow initial sync on VirtualBox StartOS Knots setup

I just installed VirtualBox StartOS in a windows 11 NUC. After running Knots for the first time for 10 hours overnight, the IBD progress is still at 0.88%. The service logs show that it is definitely syncing. In my VM setting, network adaptor is attached to Bridged Adapter. In the Knots setting, “Disable Clearnet” is unchecked. ChatGPT gave me some fixes to try but I want to get some feedback first. Here are what the Chat suggested. Please let me know what you think.

  1. Enable Host I/O Cache. (currently unchecked)
  2. Switch disk controller from SATA → NVMe inside VM settings.
  3. Switch the Virtual Disk from dynamic to fixed size.
  4. Switch the VM network setting’s Promiscuous Mode from “Deny” to “Allow VMs” or “Allow All.”
  5. It suggested adding peers manually but I think I already have 11 peers based on the “Connections 11 (1 in / 11 out)” under Bitcoin Knots/Properties.

Other information:
CPU cores assigned:2. RAM assigned:8192MB.
I added a NVME to a barebone NUC14MNK-B2. Has 4 CPU cores.

Below is my current Knots settings:
Knots/Config
ZeroMQ enabled
Transaction index enabled
Coinstats index disabled
Pruning mode disabled

Bitcoin Knots/Config/RPC settings
RPC server timeout 30
Threads 16
Work Queue 128

Bitcoin Knots/Config/Advanced/peers
“Make public” enabled
“Disable peer discovery” disabled
“Disable Clearnet” disabled
“Use V2 P2P transport protocol” enabled

Bitcoin Knots/Properties
Disk usage 5.99 G1B
Connections 11 (1 in / 11 out)

8 gigs of RAM is a questionable amount of RAM to do anything bitcoin quickly, post-UTXO bloat. The device itself is under-powered and even without a host OS and VirtualBox getting in the way, would sync slowly.

That said, 10hrs and 0.88% seems excessively slow! I wonder if in the Bitcoin health checks it keeps saying “timed out”. If so, it’s definitely a specs issue. If not, I’d assume some kind of VirtualBox issue.