fsync takes a very long time

[pwaller]

I am observing frequent (several times a day) occasions where my virtual machine freezes completely. The system monitor shows that the CPU is busy with "IOWAIT". I experience sometimes individual applications freezing, sometimes the whole system goes unresponsive.

I managed to grab the following information from latencytop (see attached.).

It seems that the system is stuck inside a long fsync. This particular screenshot was not taken at the optimum time to see the really long pause, but sometimes it can last upwards of half a minute, during which the virtual machine is unusable.

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 kernel
Linux pluto 2.6.35-23-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Tue Oct 26 17:13:06 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

With Windows 7 as the host.

Thanks in advance,

- Peter

[pwaller]

I have reported a bug here, since there have been no comments on this post for over a week now.

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7764