How to find out which guest has high CPU usage from HOST?

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Windows hosts.
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FaxedInvitation
Posts: 4
Joined: 15. Dec 2019, 13:03

How to find out which guest has high CPU usage from HOST?

Post by FaxedInvitation »

I'm running VirtualBox 6.1 on a Windows 10 host. And I have a number of guests, both Linux + Windows.

Quite regularly, one of my guests will cause high CPU issue relating to some runaway process or whatever, nothing related to virtualization, just general bugs in Linux/Windows software or otherwise large workloads being done.

If I open Microsoft's "Task Manager" on my Windows host, it just shows that VBoxHeadless has high CPU usage, no clues on which guest is the problem.

My only option so far has been to login into each guest one-by-one and use htop (Linux guests) or Task Manager (Windows guests) inside each one. Obviously slow & tedious...

How can I find out which guest(s) are using the most CPU compared to the rest of the guests, but directly from the host?

As an example on what I'm after... Chrome has its own internal CPU usage screen which you can open with shift-esc, and it tells you which browser tabs are chewing the CPU. Search "chrome task manager" on Google Images if you're not sure what I'm referring to here.

...I'm looking for something like this for VirtualBox's guests, either as a GUI or terminal commands.
fth0
Volunteer
Posts: 5668
Joined: 14. Feb 2019, 03:06
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Linux, Windows 10, ...
Location: Germany

Re: How to find out which guest has high CPU usage from HOST?

Post by fth0 »

FaxedInvitation wrote:If I open Microsoft's "Task Manager" on my Windows host, it just shows that VBoxHeadless has high CPU usage, no clues on which guest is the problem.
In the Windows Task Manager, open the Details tab and add the column Command line. ;)

If you want to do a more sophisticated analysis from within a terminal, take a look at 8.33. VBoxManage metrics.
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