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VirtualBox 2.1.0 keeps 'pausing'

Posted: 20. Jan 2009, 10:14
by myxiplx
I've been using Virtualbox since version 2 and haven't had any real performance problems. Since upgrading to 2.1, my virtual machines keep pausing.

It's only for a few seconds at a time, but it's very annoying, and is happening on two separate hosts, with two separate virtual machines. I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on both hosts. VirtualBox 2.0.6 is fine on each, 2.1.0 has these regular pauses.

Has anybody else seen this?

Posted: 20. Jan 2009, 21:55
by Sasquatch
When the VM pauses, it should always give the reason why it does it. Like low disk space, or not enough memory on the Host. Give more info, like we ask in the Forum Posting Guide.

Posted: 29. Jan 2009, 17:49
by myxiplx
Ok, I think I have a little more information on this now. Its been hard to pinpoint since at the times the guest 'pauses', there is plenty of memory free on both the guest and host, and neither the CPU nor disk is showing any significant usage. The last time this happened both my guest and host were stable at around 25% CPU usage, not under strain at all.

However, I think it might be related to graphics. Today it's happened many times when I've run two instances of the program "Dameware Mini Remote Control". Almost every time I opened a second copy of the program, I had to disconnect one or the other because the guest became unusable.

What I've just found is that if I shrink the windows that Dameware is using, I can happily have two instances running, and it's far, far more responsive than it has been for a long while. I'm running this virtual machine at 1920x1200 resolution, and had two 1280x1024 instances of Dameware running. Both of those have been shrunk now to approximately 650-800 pixels wide.

Is there any way to get performance logs out of the virtualbox graphics subsystem, or further troubleshoot to see if this is a bottleneck?

Posted: 25. Feb 2009, 10:33
by myxiplx
Well, yesterday I upgraded to 2.1.4, and this problem is back with a vengenace. 2.1.2 seemed fine, certainly much better than before, but now it's taking me 20 minutes to write an email. 1-2 times in each sentence the computer is pausing and not responding to input. 30 seconds or so later, it wakes up again, and whatever I typed starts to appear.

In fact, it's just recovered as I finished that paragraph, and the last 3 words I typed have just been entered in the email.

So the entire machine has been hung for the time taken for me to open the virtualbox website, find the forums, search for my post, and write an entire paragraph of text.

My host machine is seeing no performance problems. It's a quad core machine and the busiest core is only at 20% usage, the others are all around 5-10%. In terms of memory, I've got 2.3GB used out of 3GB, so there's still 700MB free, and it's only using 33MB of swapfile.

The virtual machine also seems fine - CPU usage there is steady at 1-2%, and it's using 588MB out of 768. Also, during these 'pauses', the task manager display is updating fine.

So it seems that this pausing is related to keyboard input somehow.

Posted: 27. Feb 2009, 15:47
by Sasquatch
So the task manager _inside_ the VM is still updating it's view? What if you create a new VM and install the current VM anew. Does that give the same issues?

Re: VirtualBox 2.1.0 keeps 'pausing'

Posted: 28. Sep 2009, 20:13
by brianjester
I had the same problem with VirtualBox 3.0.6.

In the Sun VirtualBox windows, I selected Machine>Show Log and observed a line like this:

00:02:05.679 Console: VM runtime error: fatal=false, errorID=HostMemoryLow message="Unable to allocate and lock memory. The virtual machine will be paused. Please close applications to free up memory or close the VM"

I then turned off my Paused machine (I didn't save the state).

Then in the Sun VirtualMachine window, I highlighted my VM, selected Settings, then from the "<NAME_YOU_GAVE_YOUR_VM> - Settings" window, selected System and observed the following warning in orange that said:

"On the System page, you have assigned more than 50% of your computer's memory (2.00 GB) to the virtual machine. Not enough memory might be left for your host operating system. Continue at your own risk."

I then adjusted memory down to a more reasonable level (which also did not give me a warning), and the machine started fine with no Pausing.