virtualbox.org

HI,

I've been successfully running a Win 7 guest on my 2015 Macbook Pro for about a year or so. The VM machine was previously running on a 2011 Macbook Air and I copied it to the Macbook Pro without too much hassle. I've been running VB 5.6 for a while but about 4 weeks ago the Win 7 guest started "hanging" at random times, sometimes shortly after staring it but sometimes up to 20 minutes later. As the machine was unreliable I updated to VB 6.0.2 and reinstalled Guest Additions for VB 6.0. Sadly Win 7 is still "hanging" even after only a few minutes use. I thought for a while that it was just the mouse not being captured properly, but today I saw an app load to 89% and get no further as Win 7 had stopped responding. I've updated to VB 6.0.8 and the problem still persists. My guess is that it an Mac OS issue but it's beyond my technical knowledge. The Mac OS is High Sierra 10.13.6.

I enclose two Log files. VBox.log is from a machine that was started and then shut down before it hung and VBox.log2 is from a machine that hung and had to be forced closed from VB.
Any help will be greatly appreciated as I use this VM to run certain apps that I occasionally need for my freelance work.

Many thanks,

pj

Well, natch.

VBox.log wrote: 00:00:02.249213 Host RAM: 8192MB (8.0GB) total, 3211MB (3.1GB) available
...
00:00:02.438116 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000133500000 (5 155 848 192, 4 917 MB, 4.8 GB)
00:00:02.438434 VRamSize <integer> = 0x0000000004300000 (70 254 592, 67 MB)

The only mystery is why the running one ever worked.

Hello again,

Forgive my ignorance but I'm not fully understanding what the log is telling us. I'm guessing that it means lots to you, however I'm guessing that there's only 3.1 GB of RAM available after the Mac OS has had its chunk, but that the VM is trying to grab 4.8GB and that ain't gonna work?

Also, what on earth does "natch" mean? I feel very old and out of touch.

Kind regards,

pj (a 52 year old Production Sound Engineer with an A Level in Computer Science from many, many years ago. )

peejaysound wrote:however I'm guessing that there's only 3.1 GB of RAM available after the Mac OS has had its chunk, but that the VM is trying to grab 4.8GB and that ain't gonna work?

You guess correctly! The guest is trying to allocate 4,917 + 67MB of RAM when there is only 3,211MB available on the system given everything else that was running at the time the guest was launched. You would be better decreasing the guest RAM to 2GB and increasing the vRAM to 128MB (or close some applications on the host before launching the guest).

I'll let you use your favourite search engine to find the definition of "natch".

-Andy.

Thanks Andy, now I've reallocated the memory all is working well. I really don't remember changing the RAM allocation in the past few months, however maybe it's always been a bit marginal and I've subsequently installed an app that's hogging a bit more memory than before.

As for "natch"; I've tried a bit harder with a search engine and I'm looking forward to using it in day to day conversation, so thanks mpack.

Thanks both for your help.

pj

peejaysound wrote:maybe it's always been a bit marginal and I've subsequently installed an app that's hogging a bit more memory than before.

It's not a matter of what you've installed or not, it's a matter of what's running or not.

Here are a couple of applications, so that you know what's available on your system at any given time. What I do, is to have several monitor tools running at all times. Your preference may vary, but you can use any or all of them. I use all of them concurrently:

• MenuMeters (for OSX > 10.10).
• X Resource Graph.
• Memory Monitor.
• HWSensors.
• Built-in Activity monitor.

Marking it as [Resolved].