Excessive Page Faults in VirtualBox

[saberman]

Host: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 with all important patches
VirtualBox 5.1.18
Guest: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 with all important patches assigned 1.5GB RAM.

I notice that VirtualBox seem to have an excessive number of page faults -- even when the guest is idle. This happens if the guest is started and left with the login screen up. It also happens if a user is logged into the guest. I started a guest, let it sit idle for a few minutes and then logged into it and let it sit ideal. The total elapsed time was twenty minutes and it is up to 2.5 million page faults and generating them at a rate of about one to two thousand a second. Yet the peak working set is only 114,696 K, the paged pool is 592 K and the NP Pool is 131 K.

I created a test machine defined as Windows 7 without a hard drive an nothing in the DVD driver and powered it up. It is getting page faults at a low rate of a dozen or so a second. Every now and then it will get over a hundred in a second. This is without anything running in the VM.

[Perryg]

Hard to say without accompanying documentation. Log files (as an attachment), plus what ever is showing you the page faults.

[saberman]

Task Manger shows the page faults.

I have attached a log file from a currently running VM. It has 7 million page faults and still getting them.

[Perryg]

Several issues to address.

• 1) upgrade the guest additions to match the running version of VirtualBox. (Guest shows 4.1.16 GAs)
  2) change the vRPD port in the guest settings. You have a port conflict with the guests RDP.

[saberman]

The excessive paging occurred under 4.1.16 and before I enabled RDP on the guest. However I have disablied RDP on the guest and the excessive paging continues.

I am only running 4.1.18 on one host to confirm it does not introduce additioional problems. I will update the GA when I upgrade VitrualBox on the other hosts.

Again, the excess paging occurs on all VMs with or without RDP enabled and it occurred under 4.1.16 with the 4.1.16 GA installed.

Please not that the VirtualBox monitor running by itself and sitting idle will continue to generate page faults.

If you are running a Windows host close all VMs and VirtualBox monitor. Start Task Manager and add the Page Faults column to the Processes tab. Then start VirtualBox Monitor and watch it happily page fault well after it completes startup and is sitting idle. Start any Windows guest (may happen with others but I am not running them) and watch the page faults run into the millions even after the guest has completed startup and is sitting idle. I have 8GB RAM on the host and the VMs are assigned 1.5GB RAM.

[Perryg]

These kinds of problems that are reproducible should be reported to bugtracker. If you have not signed on to Bugtracker before you will need to select a new Nickname to be able to report issues.
It would also help if you can post the ticket number here so other can see the progress, add information, or see the final results.

[saberman]

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10722