Win10 using too much system resources

[pauljames]

Hi, this has been an ongoing issue for a quite a while. Thought I would see if I can find some answers or fix for it. The issue is windows 10 64bit uses too much of the host system (Ubuntu 16.04) The win10 guest was setup to use KVM as accelerator, 8GB memory, 2 x vCPUs, execution cap 50%. Enabled VT and nested paging. Storage is a .vdi file dynamically allocated. A few lines from top below:

top - 17:40:56 up 6 days, 23:07,  1 user,  load average: 1.89, 1.58, 1.23
Tasks: 326 total,   1 running, 325 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  3.0 us, 10.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 85.5 id,  1.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 16119852 total,   180584 free, 10768644 used,  5170624 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 62500856 total, 60800904 free,  1699952 used.  4556992 avail Mem 

  PID USER   PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
31728 paul   20   0 11.253g 8.545g 8.420g S 100.0 55.6  37:47.74 VirtualBox
31596 paul   20   0 1972376 161372 105772 S   9.1  1.0   0:32.90 Web Content
 3660 paul   20   0 1986160 226088 225920 S   1.7  1.4 169:52.94 VBoxHeadless
10241 paul   20   0 2883600 301928  85944 S   1.7  1.9  10:19.57 firefox-esr
31297 paul   20   0   39028   3416   2636 R   1.7  0.0   0:37.24 top

The win 10 guest has the following :

win10.jpg (71.9 KiB) Viewed 1203 times

The following tasks are running (only top few):

win10-tm.jpg (67.34 KiB) Viewed 1203 times

Thank you for any help with this.

[socratis]

I see "VirtualBox" and "VBoxHeadless". Can you please explain how are you running the VM?

In the chopped TaskManager pic, I see the CPU being at 91%, but you don't have the processes sorted by their CPU usage, so I can't tell who's doing what in there. Wild guess; the Windows Update, the indexing, the .NET optimization, or the Windows Installer. But if the guest is doing something CPU intensive, don't you think that this will be reflected on the host? I'm not sure why you're surprised here.

The win10 guest was setup to use KVM as accelerator

That's wrong! Why did you change it from the default? That is not called "accelerator" BTW, it's called "Paravirtualization Interface" and it should be left to the Default option, unless you know what you're doing, and I don't think you do know how this feature works. For more information see ch. 10.4 Paravirtualization Providers of the User Manual.

execution cap 50%

Again, that's not right. The Execution Cap should be left at 100% unless under very specific conditions. You're telling the guest that your CPU is so-and-so, only to have it perform at 50% of its capacity. That could potentially confuse an OS that's fine-tuned on the CPU capabilities.

We need to see a complete VBox.log, from a complete VM run, where the problem occurs:

• Start the VM from cold-boot (not from a paused or saved state) / Observe problem / Shutdown the VM (force close it if you have to).
• With the VM completely shut down (not paused or saved), right-click on the VM in the VirtualBox Manager and select "Show Log".
• Save only the first "VBox.log", ZIP it and attach it to your response. See the "Upload attachment" tab below the reply form.