Windows 8.1 guest becomes more sluggish until it stops

[berntd]

G'day

It will work for around 22-24 hours and then suddenly when I type text or move windows, it becomes more an more slow before the action happens. It get so bad that I eventually can't even get back to the host machine to kill the VM. I then have to reboot the computer.

The task manager / resource monitor has no obvious issues that I can see and the host machine is also fine.

I am running 2 displays and I occasionally do see problems(block in graphics go missing) when dragging pictures from screen 1 to screen 2.

I have attached the log file from the host. The machine is currently in the "becoming rapidly more sluggish" state.

Perhaps there is something else I can test / try?

[berntd]

My boss just looked at this and it appears to be a virtual box problem as follows:

1) restart the win 8.1 guest without restarting the VM did not fix the sluggishness.
2) During the sluggishness, he pasued the VM, saved the machine state, and shut it down and restarted it.
The machne started in the same state as before but the sluggishness was gone.

[mpack]

00:00:00.242311 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000004 (4)
...
00:00:00.365447 CPUM: Physical host cores: 4

Try leaving one or two cores for the host to use. You shouldn't be assigning more than 2 cores to this VM on this host.

[berntd]

Hello and thank you for helping.

I think it was set to 2 before and I recently upped it to 4 to see if it would help.
According to lscpu, there are 8 cores on this system. The VB settings also show 8 as available and I have set it to 4.

Code: Select all

Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                8
On-line CPU(s) list:   0-7
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    4
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            6
Model:                 94
Model name:            Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz
Stepping:              3
CPU MHz:               799.929
CPU max MHz:           4000.0000
CPU min MHz:           800.0000
BogoMIPS:              6815.85
Virtualisation:        VT-x
L1d cache:             32K
L1i cache:             32K
L2 cache:              256K
L3 cache:              8192K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-7

Regards
Bernt

[socratis]

According to lscpu, there are 8 cores on this system.

According to Intel, there are 4 cores on this system. You choose who you want to believe...

[Perryg]

Just to calrify "CPU(s): 8" actually stands for central processing units and not cores. Linux as with others have a hard time making everyone happy so they call threads vCPUs or vitrual CPUs. To date almost everyone thinks it means cores but it is not. Just like almost all OSes rate bandwidth as MB/sec when in reality it is Mb/sec. The difference being 8 times not including overhead like crc and the like. MB = Mega byte and Mb = mega bit ( it take 8 bits to make a byte ). I think it is intentional to make everyone think they are getting more than they really do in order to brag and or maybe something other than it really is ( think marketing ).

[socratis]

Ever since I found the ark website of Intel, I simply point to their entries. To their (engineering dept.) credit, they have included popups next to the "Cores" and "Threads" that cleanly describes the differences between the two:

• A Core is a hardware term that describes the number of independent central processing units in a single computing component (die or chip).
• A Thread, or thread of execution (or logical CPU), is a software term for the basic ordered sequence of instructions that can be passed through or processed by a single CPU core.

Source: http://ark.intel.com

Their marketing dept. on the other hand, wishes they could just redirect everything ark.intel.com to /dev/null.

[berntd]

I am now struggling as I am not that savvy on this stuff. I write embedded firmware and know very little about Linux and VMs

It has a I7-6700 8M processor in it according to the Dell service tag lookup.
This has 4 cores and 8 threads as you pointed out.

It was set to 2 cpus (out of 8 available) in the VM settings but the problem was present and that is why I changed it to 4, to see if it would help. Answer = No.

I will set it back to 2 cores but then what can I do / try?

[socratis]

Set it to 2 CPUs, try it and if you have a problem, post a new VBox.log. ZIPPED this time please...