Win7 x64 guest stalls, pauses under Vbox 4.04

[hilltop]

Experiencing the following very frustrating behavior.

New VM recently created in vbox 4.04. Guest = Win7 Pro x64, host = Ubuntu 10.10 amd64, latest kernel, all updates applied. Host hardware is a Dell T3500 with quad core Xeon with HT and 6GB RAM (plenty of horsepower). Guest Additions installed. VM has 2GB RAM, 128 MB video, 2 CPUs. 2D acceleration enabled. 3D acceleration not enabled. Note that host storage is an ext4 filesystem, so Vbox requires Host I/O caching be enabled for all VM's due to known Linux kernel bug.

Behavior: every 30 secs or so, depending on user activity in the guest, Win7 freezes/stalls for about 15 secs, then resumes. Have a WinXP x64 SP3 VM running for last 2 years on Vbox version 3.x thru 4.04 and it runs perfectly...and fast. Also have an Ubuntu 10.04 guest that runs perfectly as well.

Have scoured this forum for answers. Some similar issues found but not this one. I have tried everything including the following: 2D acceleration on/off, 3D acceleration on/off (installed in Safe Mode), more RAM allocated, less video memory, dropped VM to 1 CPU, raised VM to 4 CPUs, no guest additions, re-install guest additions, download latest Windows 7 drivers, and many other VM settings toggled on/off or changed one at a time to isolate impact. Nothing eliminates the stalling. The only mitigating factor I have found is if I disable Audio in the VM, the stalling is less frequent but not eliminated. (VM audio is PulseAudio on host, Intel HD Audio on Guest.)

In the Win7 guest, I have turned on/off the visual performance settings (in Computer properties), chosen a non-Aero theme, disabled all power management props. Nothing corrects the freezing/stalling.

Could this be a Vbox 4.04 bug or a problem with the latest Guest Additions? It is understandable for this guest to run a little slower, but the freezing every minute or so is not normal. Is anyone else experiencing this issue with Win7 64 bit Guest?

[FractalMode]

Hilltop, I have almost verbatim the same experience as you with an almost identical setup. 4 GB instead of 6 GB on an Acer 5530-5356 Turion X2 notebook. Having stepped through the same set of self-help convolutions as you did, I am almost at a loss of how to proceed. There are forum suggestions regarding improving audio performance and a fixed size vdi that I plan to try but other than that I'm currently pretty stumped.

[paulg_ca]

I have the same issue when I am running Win 7 - Sp1 64bit on Solaris Express 11... Any one has a solution ? Did anyone file a bug report yet ?

Paul

[madrowler]

I'm having the same issue on a MacBook Pro. Mine stutters every few seconds. There is no reason why this should be happening. My computer has a Core i7 quad-core cpu and 8GB of RAM.

[hilltop]

Thanks for the feedback. Glad to hear that I am not alone in this. I really think (guessing) that this is a vbox or a guest additions bug. With your replies, it appears that this is not related to the host's OS (observed on Linux, Solaris, MacOS). I will keep testing changes and report back here if anything fixes this issue. Would be grateful if you did the same. Definitely feels like something to do with the audio but not sure. Very strange behavior. Makes the guest practically unusable.

[krisbee]

After a long break from VMs I started using Vbox 4.0.4 to see how things have progressed in the last 12 months.

Win XP preforms well, but WIn 7 (32bit)it is a different story. I have a humble dual athlon x2, with 2Gb of memory. If I create a win7 VM with ICH9 selcted as the chipset. IO APIC cannot be disabled without a horrible workaround of editing the XML file and making it read-only. ICH9 + IO APIC enabled seems to kill performance and the VM stalls, pauses and crashes. Audio is poor with clicks, pops and crackles,Foobar with WASAPI crashes atfer a few seconds of trying to play an audio file, things are slighty improved if USB is disabled. So I don't think the problems are restricted to 64bit verisons of Win7.

The only way I can get a useable Win7 VM is to select PIIX3 as the chipset, disable IOAPIC and stick with one CPU and 1GB of memory for the VM. Audio still suffers from slight clicks and crackles, but at least Foobar/WASAPI works well and CPU usage doesn't seem to suffer from the same 99% spikes.

The VM seems to run more smoothly if I use a BFS enabled kernel. But VM disk access seems slow and there seems little improvement over previous Vbox version when using a "SATA" virtual disk, which in anycase runs in IDE compatible mode and windows will not install if you choose a port beyond 4 on the SATA controller in the hope of getting real SATA performance. . In fact VM disk access seems better in my Win XP VM where I stuck to using an IDE virtual hard drive.

Guest additions are loaded in both VMs, but I did not load the 3D drivers. The USB extension pack is loaded in Vbox.

[SMStallings48]

I am also having a problem where the guest OS pauses. Using Task Manager and a watch, I have found that the cycle is about 25 to 30 seconds of normal operation and 20 to 25 second pauses. Here are some other observations.

- This problem stops when I close TweetDeck. I suspect that the problem is not caused by TweetDeck; that it is exposed when TweetDeck is not able to get a resource. Sync operations by Evernote do not cause pauses. Internet browsing does not cause pauses. So, it doesn't seem to be all applications that need network adapter access.

- During the pauses, the system clock is stopped. Leading to the clock being increasingly off until it is again synced.

- During the pauses, there is no CPU or disc activity. There is sparse, brief network activity as indicated in the VirtualBox frame indicators. I am using bridged, Intel 82567v adapters.

I don't have a lot of time to spend on this at this time and from the preceeding posts, experimenting with various configurations doesn't seem to be very fruitful. I want to first see if my above comments result in any helpful feedback from others more knowledgeable of VirtualBox than I am and then I'll make time as necessary.

Thanks in advance.

[hilltop]

Thanks for your comments. SMStallings48, your observations of the Win7 stalling behavior are *identical* to mine: the frequency of occurrence, the stopping of the system clock, the fact that not every app exacerbates the problem. I have very few apps installed but what consistently causes the pausing for me is simply navigating the filesystem and Control Panels via Explorer.

I think a bug needs to be opened on this with VirtualBox, if one is not already. Krisbee, I will take a snapshot of (my now activated) Win7 guest and try some of the settings changes you are suggesting and report back. (Unfortunately, as a working stiff, I have scant time to do this and only on weekends.) If the VirtualBox engineering team monitors this forum, please take note.

[wacher]

I have a guest W7 installation, I made it in era of 3.x.

Since I upgraded to 4.x I have similar problem like described above, but I solved (partly)
[*]If I set chipset to PIIX3 then everything is OK.
[*]If I set chipset to ICH9 then the systems stalls.
This is totally reproducable, i tried several times.

(guest WinXP not depends on this chipset settings)

This is not Linux specific problem, I have WinXP host.

Some cross reference:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8629

[hilltop]

I am confirming that switching from the ICH9 chipset to the PIIX3 chipset solves the frequent stalling and pausing that is the subject of this thread. However, to reiterate what wacher said, I cannot tell if this is a complete solution.

To be clear:
With the newer ICH9 chipset support (introduced in Vbox 4), the stalling and pausing of Win7 occurs.
With the original PIIX3 chipset support, the stalling and pausing seems to go away.

(By the way, Windows 7 did not ask me to re-activate when I switched from ICH9 to PIIX3.)

If this is a bug in Vbox 4, I hope it is fixed soon.

[SMStallings48]

Switching from the ICH9 chipset to the PIIX3 chipset solved the problem for me also.

[nike]

Does turning on HPET on PIIX3 ( VBoxManage modifyvm vm --hpet on) changes smth?

[wacher]

Frank asked something to test:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8629#comment:3

[frank]

Please also answer Nikes question (piix3 with hpet).

[wacher]

Does turning on HPET on PIIX3 ( VBoxManage modifyvm vm --hpet on) changes smth?

I tested 4.0.5(!) (r71137) with settings <HPET enabled="true"/> and <Chipset type="PIIX3"/>.
(Host: WinXP, Guest: Win7)

Result: system stalls for some seconds in every minute (like ICH9). After disabling HPET, everything works good.