all VB guests suddenly run at a crawl

[mikeyzman]

I've been running a guest Win7-32 Vbox for about 2 years now. Last Wednesday, the March 15th 2017, it started to run brutally slow. It worked, but every application I launched in the guest took forever to open and then lagged by 20 or so seconds. The first thing I did was try to run a boottime scan with Avast on the GuestOS. That went at a crawl, taking 24 hours to get to 24% done - this is before Windows actually gets going. So that told me something was wrong with the VB itself. I opened the task manager on my host, to see if anything egregious was running but no, there wasn't but I did notice that about 5 of the CPUs kept pegging out at 100% use. These are spikes and go away but they really stood out.

I updated my Host windows (win7-64), and ran a virus scan on it, as well. I made sure my guest OS was updated, and I updated Chrome and Firefox within it (took forever). I then loaded Mint-64 into another virtualbox instance - it seems a little faster, but there's definitely problems.

I have another machine in my office, where I loaded VB, and copied my win7-32 guest over to it, and started another machine, and it runs absolutely fine.

So I am really thinking it is my Host machine. Any ideas how to troubleshoot from here? IF I turn Nested Paging off, the guest OS won't start at all, and if it does then it takes Minutes to get to the login screen and minutes from there to even get where you can try an application, and there's no more network/internet connection altogether.

Yes all the Virtualizatin checkboxes (VT) are enabled in my Host sytem Bios.

And again I would like to reiterate, same virtualbox image on another machine runs just fine. I think there were some microsoft updates on the 15th, which I think I installed. I rolled the latest 2 (the only latest 2) back and that had no effect, either (both on the host and guest OS).

Any help is appreciated, sorry if this post is redundant, I did search and search but each one is its own unique flavor and by the time you get to anything close its 7 years old topic.

[mikeyzman]

I forgot to mention, I am up to date with my virtualbox client, guest additions and extension pack, its all in sync with 5.1.18 or whatever it is today.

[socratis]

First of all, I didn't go thoroughly through your VBox.log, but I couldn't help noticing this:

00:00:01.000723 Guest OS type: 'Windows7'
00:00:01.034591 Name    <string>  = "Win7_32_updated" (cb=16)
00:00:01.034596 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000192700000 (6 751 780 864, 6 439 MB, 6 GB)

Why do you assign 6 GB of RAM to a system that can see only 3.5 GB?

Now, as far as the slowness. Do you have an antivirus running on the host? If yes, can you disable it? Does it change the situation?

[mikeyzman]

Thanks Socratis, I forgot this was 32 and set the Ram higher in one of my experiments.

I turned off my Host PC antivirus (AVAST) and it made no difference, other than setting off bells and whistles that I was currently unprotected. I also completely shut VB down and restarted with the AV off, and the same problem still exists. Let me know any other troubleshooting measures I can run. I added the newest log file

[mikeyzman]

I created a new VB with windows 10 - 32 and while it runs better, its still crawling along, youtube stutters like crazy - there's times I think the machine is okay but its just the network thats hosed.

I'll port this over to my other machine monday and see how it works but I'm convinced its either Virtualbox altogether or something on my Host machine, which is a fairly new high-end workstation.

[Teixi_varadero]

Same problem here.

Here afects to win7 and centos guests, them all 64bits
Host windows10 updated.

Acer host (can't acces to advanced bios, but virtualization options enabled, I know it thanks to some software).

The problem seems to be since 17th march, when windows 10 updated. On another host (not updated) there is no problem.
I have no problem with windows 32bits guests.

Thanks

[socratis]

Thanks for your post about the Win10 host update. #mikeyzman mentioned something about 2017-03-15, so it may be something related. I updated my Win10 host on 2017-03-16 and I have the following updates:

• KB4014329: Adobe Flash (I don't think so).
• KB4013429: Cumulative update for Win10x64-1607. This contains the following "gem":
  
  • Addressed known issue called out in KB3213986. Users may experience delays while running 3D rendering apps with multiple monitors.
  • Addressed an issue where the Virtual Machine Management Service (Vmms.exe) may crash during a live migration of virtual machines.
• KB4013418: Update for Win10x64-1607.
• KB3150513: Update for Win10x64-1607.
• KB890830: Malicious software removal tool (I don't think so).

[mikeyzman]

I tried my new windows 10-32 VB over to my other machine and it runs like a champ. I tried uninstalling the last few updates on my problem Host machine, and not a hill of beans worth of difference. Thanks for the ideas on the updates, my host OS is still Win 7-64 not windows 10. Very frustrating. I need this machine to run older engineering programs every so often. Any other troubleshooting thoughts?

[socratis]

I never actually analyzed your log thoroughly, so I believe I owe you that one:

00:00:00.960149 File system of 'C:\Users\MikeZ\VirtualBox VMs\Win7_32_updated\Snapshots' (snapshots) is unknown
00:00:00.960156 File system of 'E:\VirtualBox\From_old_machine_but_updated\Win7_32_Xilinx_updated.vdi' is ntfs

• What's "E:\"? Internal or external? If the latter, what's the connection mechanism? Also, the VM name doesn't match with the VDI name. Was this VDI manually moved/copied/attached from another VM?

00:00:00.989263   NumCPUs           <integer> = 0x0000000000000001 (1)
00:00:01.368516 CPUM: Logical host processors: 12 present, 12 max, 12 online, online mask: 0000000000000fff
00:00:01.368518 CPUM: Physical host cores: 6

• You have 6 physical CPUs, you could definitely afford another vCPU for your VM.

• You don't have 3D acceleration enabled. You should.

Comparison of times between your VM and my VM:

00:00:01.715539 VMMDev: Guest Log: BIOS: AHCI 0-P#0: PCHS=16383/16/63 LCHS=1024/255/63 0x0000000005537280 sectors
00:00:02.503473 VMMDev: Guest Log: BIOS: AHCI 0-P#0: PCHS=16383/16/63 LCHS=1024/255/63 0x000000000a000000 sectors
...
00:00:21.178957 VMMDev: Guest Log: VBoxGuest: Windows version 6.1, build 7601
00:00:14.904031 VMMDev: Guest Log: VBoxGuest: Windows version 6.1, build 7601

• In between the two events where you start clearly ahead, but you're left way behind, several screen resize events happen and the initial boot sequence/hard disk intensive processes happens. That's why I focused on the "E:\" drive.

For future reference, you should completely shut down the VM before grabbing the VBox.log. Then ZIP it before attaching it to your response.