Page 1 of 1

Copy and paste is very unstable

Posted: 29. Apr 2013, 16:26
by xpt
Hi,

I've been using VirtualBox for years, and copy and paste has always been unstable. I'm now so frustrated about it and finally decided to jump over the hoops to register a forum account to complain about it.

I know Copy and paste,

- must be enabled in the VM settings.
-It will only work if the Guest Additions are installed in the Guest.
- And it will only copy text - not files.

No problem with that, but the stability -- It works when the VM is freshly started, but it won't be long before the copy and paste capability between the host and client is gone.

Host: Win 7 desktop, 12G Mem
Guest: Ubuntu Precise

I restart my Win 7 Host every week, but because of loosing the copy and paste capability in my VM, I normally need to restart my VM at least 3 times a week. When the situation is worse, I need to restart my VM two or three time a day! As a reference, my Linux system back home will last months before I ever need to restart . This is so frustrating.

Over the years, I was trying to observer what cause the copy and paste to be gone, and finally realized that there is no reason at all. It works seconds before, and when I try to copy another word, it just suddenly stop working. I've been carefully observing my RAM usage lately because I was thinking it might be caused by extreme end conditions, but notice that my host RAM usage was never close to 60%, yet the copy and paste will be gone at any moment.

Anyone experience the same as well?

Re: Copy and paste is very unstable

Posted: 29. Apr 2013, 16:39
by xpt
If you are a VirtualBox support staff, it is very easy to duplicate the problem.

- Start a Linux guest under Win 7 Host that has limited RAM.
- Make sure copy and paste is working between the host and client
- Start chromium in Win 7 Host and browser some random web pages, each in different tabs,
- and view some youtube videos as well. You don't need to watch the whole videos, starting it for several seconds will do, then stop it and jump to another one.
- Try copy and paste between the host and client again.

It won't be long for the copy and paste to be gone.

When it is gone,

- it is always that copy from Win 7 Host and paste into Linux guest that is not working. The other way around normally still works.
- it will not work if I merely restart my Linux within VM, but I have to stop the VirtualBox entirely, and restart again.

Then it will work again.

Re: Copy and paste is very unstable

Posted: 29. Apr 2013, 16:47
by xpt
Over the several years that I've been using VirtualBox, the copy and paste has always been very unstable. There isn't any reason that I could found that is causing it, so I understand that it is difficult to duplicate and fix.

However, all that I'm asking is, to have a feature that restore the copy and paste capability when it is gone. As my previous post implies, it is a problem between the VirtualBox and host, so it should be easy to reset / restore the copy and paste functionality between the VirtualBox and host and straight out any mysterious failures.

Thanks

Re: Copy and paste is very unstable

Posted: 8. May 2013, 16:08
by xpt
xpt wrote:I've been carefully observing my RAM usage lately because I was thinking it might be caused by extreme end conditions, but notice that my host RAM usage was never close to 60%, yet the copy and paste will be gone at any moment.
Latest milestone: copy and paste gone even my RAM usage is below 30%.