Using Virtualbox seems to slow down the system [Solved]

[linuxforever]

How about showing us the QSI taken while everything is running and taking the most resources, so we could see if anything is really reaching a limit, instead of afterwards?



@Stevo - Turns out impossible to run W10 in VM AND MX at the same time - the whole system just freezes and never recovers. I have to restart every time. I could show a QSI when VM/W10 runs, not sure it is useful though. But I will do as you say, you know way more than I do.

[linuxforever]

Verify your hard drives are running ahci mode and not raid mode. Many machines are setup initially out of the mfg running raid mode. If the machine is not in ahci mode, you should change it, it will make a big difference.

I checked in the BIOS, all hard drives are running in ahci mode.

[baldyeti]

I don't like it (because I own one of these myself), but I don't think your CPU properly supports virtualization. It's the Ivy Bridge Core i7 that has hyperthreading, vtx and kvm support or whatever the Intel virtualization technologies are called. I don't know if virtualization features are standard in 2021, but in 2012-2013 I don't think they were.

The i5-3470 does support some virtualisation features at least:

Code: Select all

Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) ‡ Yes
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) ‡ Yes
Intel® VT-x with Extended Page Tables (EPT) ‡ Yes

[antiX-Dave]

You have a bunch of things running that I would consider extra.... Maybe someone with more systemd knowledge can help you trim down some of the running programs to get your idle ram down from 3+ GB usage.

Maybe add a swap file and mount it before running the virtual machine so you can see how much ram you actually need when running vs mathematically calculated.
The swap file should give you some breathing room to let you run some investigative commands. The lockup is because there is no memory for the system to work with after allocation to the virtual machine. From the readout there is ~ 1GB freely available under your regular usage that could be allotted to the virtual machine but you are allocating 4 times that amount.

[linuxforever]

"The lockup is because there is no memory for the system to work with after allocation to the virtual machine."

This I fully understand.

"You have a bunch of things running that I would consider extra...." - That's interesting, I am always eager to shut down and/or eliminate everything that is superfluous.

[linuxforever]

"Maybe someone with more systemd knowledge can help you trim down some of the running programs to get your idle ram down from 3+ GB usage."

Frankly, I am not knowledgeable enough to understand whether running on systemd is better or worse than any other option. Also, I would be most grateful to get some advice on this, as well as on the possibility of "trimming down" unnecessary background processes, as you wrote.
Thanks again.

[antiX-Dave]

Some of the items *I would* consider extra, your usage / wants may very:
teamviewer (unless someone is remotely helping you, otherwise start it when you need it), unattended-upgrade, colord, nfsd (unless you are using nfs shares), freshclam, fbxkb(d) (unless switching keyboard locale graphically), redshift-gtk & redshift, xiccd, geoclue, solaar (unless you have logitech wireless hardware), cups daemon (unless you have a printer / scanner), system-config-printer (again unless you have a printer/scanner, even then you do not really need it running all the time), some systemd "services", etc.

I would even consider slack/signal/chromium, but I would guess you are using slack / signal to talk around the office and chromium is a browser choice which there are many opinions about which browser to use. Some of these you can disable in "session and startup" under the application tab (which modifies the files in ~/.config/autostart), others I would just remove but you may want to keep (EG: teamviewer, red/color shifts, . Others would need to be shutdown on init which you are using systemd for and I do not have installed nor the commands memorized.

Did you try adding a swap file (I know it is not good for solid state drives) or increase the ram?
Beyond that there is no real fix. You can do some working around in both the host and the guest to get the ram usage a low as possible in both and make it work. But it will forever be a problem to work around especially if you want to use all your programs at the same time (EG: chromium with a few tabs + slack/signal while playing a game loaded and running in the windows VM).

[linuxforever]

@antiX-Dave - Many thanks for your tips. I ignore how Teamviewer ended up here, certainly not installed by me nor on purpose.
I use ClamTK, so I think I should keep Freshclam?
I do use a printer, therefor I am hesitant to uninstall system-config-printer. Maybe once the printer is installed, it is not necessary anymore...?
I use slack/signal/chromium all the time. Chromium even more so since I constantly had pbs with Firefox - which, basically, I prefer. It became so unreliable that I gave up on it. But now there is also a proper Google Chrome for Linux." there are many opinions about which browser to use" - as many as there are users, I would guess. But maybe you have interesting infos...?
I hope to be able to add some RAM shortly, then see how things are going.
Thanks again for your precious help.

[Pierre]

as the VirtualBox is an heavy system user,
& once an VB is up & running,
then it does pay to use as few other programs, on the Host System, as is possible,
- - they do say, to limit the VB to 50% of the Host System capabilities,
and I've found that to be very helpful, on an machine with less system resources.

[SwampRabbit]

You mentioned about removing programs, it isn’t about removing them, it’s about not having them running sucking up CPU, RAM, GPU, and accessing the HHD that is part of the issue.

You said you run Signal, Slack, and Chromium all the time. Well that’s gonna eat up resources and if you’re over allocating resources you going to hit resource exhaustion and everything will slow down.

Try setting up your VM with 2-3 CPU cores, 2GBs RAM, 64MBs for the GPU. This is roughly half of your system resources.

Next, limit the amount of resources used by the host system while your running the VM. You might want to see how many of your daily use apps you can run without hitting 2GBs of RAM used.

More RAM will help, but after that disk access is the next thing to address, so an SSD would be nice if possible.