Execessive amounts of vboxheadless.exe

[Michael37]

Greetings,

I am trying to 'tune' my Windows host machine and noticed that I have 25 vboxheadless processes running.

OS Win10 Pro
Ram 32gb
Intel i7 2.7Ghz
HDD 500GB SSD & 1TB HDD
Virtual Box 5.1.12


I only have 9 VM guest running.

Why are there so many?

How do I minimize the amount or processes spawned?

Is headless the preferred way to run the VM?

[socratis]

I have 25 vboxheadless processes running ... I only have 9 VM guest running.

You're 2 processes short, are you sure you counted them right? You get 3 VBoxHeadless/VM. Don't ask why, I'm pretty sure they didn't just do it because they were masochists.

How do I minimize the amount or processes spawned?

Why do you care?

Is headless the preferred way to run the VM?

Preferred for who and why? For me personally it's not, for others definitely.

[JustinH]

Mr. socratis,
I can't directly speak for Michael, but maybe he just doesn't want a bunch of potentially useless processes running taking up resources. There is nothing unreasonable about that. Some users like to know what is going on with their systems. So that is why he might "care".

Whether these processes are useless or not is another issue.

Justin

[socratis]

Whether these processes are useless or not is another issue.

I'm afraid that this is precisely the issue. What are those processes doing? Well, I'm afraid that I cannot answer that since I don't know the developer's thinking or the whole API setup. I'm 99.99999% sure that they are useful, otherwise they wouldn't be spawning like that.

These processes are not background processes running at all times. They are running as a result of launching a headless VM. Maybe they act as a server-client setup? I don't know. Kill them and let me know how it goes.

Did you ever ask Microsoft why they have so many svchost.exe applications running? Do you think they're not needed?

[scottgus1]

Here's a screenshot of a Process Explorer view of a normal Virtualbox guest:
(Please pardon the black on purple, it's a Process Explorer thing.
And my columns are CPU, PID, I/O delta, I/O read bytes, I/O write bytes, I/O other bytes, private bytes, working set)

virtualbox normal 3 processes.PNG (8.24 KiB) Viewed 2603 times

extra load 0 CPU, 3.59 MB private bytes, 11.25MB working set.

And here's a headless guest:

virtualbox headless 3 processes.PNG (10.3 KiB) Viewed 2603 times

There's also a "conhost" process.
extra load 0 CPU, 4.94MB private bytes, 16.6MB working set.

In the days of multiple GB of memory and GHz processors, a few MB and 0 GHz load doesn't strike me as much, honestly.

Consider that headless is different than it used to be. A headless guest can be given a window, without any remote-in RDP system. So there no doubt has to be another watchdog-like process besides the actual guest process monitoring when to start the window.

Here's a headless guest given a window after start for reference:

virtualbox headless given a window.PNG (12.96 KiB) Viewed 2603 times

[Martin]

See also viewtopic.php?p=298514#p298514