Excessive Page Faults in VirtualBox

[Stewart Berman]

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.

[Stewart Berman]

Machine Log

[hdb5631]

I have the same issue. Version 4.1.18-78361-Win on WindowsXP. Just starting the Oracle Installer and I have 2million page faults already. I wonder if this will be better on Windows7. I gave the VM 512MB yet I see in "Mem Usage" it only is using 70MB. I wonder if that is related? If I knew how to make it grab all 512MB and "lock it in" there would be no paging and slowness I wonder.