Guest Windows 8.1 64 bits freeze every 2-15 minutes for several seconds/minutes

[François M]

Hi VirtualBox team,

I use Virtual Box 5.0.4 on host Windows 8.1 64 bits and my guest (Windows 8.1 64) freezes every 5 to 30 minutes for several seconds or minutes. Windows performances are OK according to Windows Task Manager. Host works perfectly with high availability.

While the guest is frozen, all mouse/keybord inputs are buffered. When guest become available, all these buffered user actions are executed very quickly.

So this VM is not really useable right now.

I attach my VMlogs to this ticket. Any help would be really appreciated! :) Thanks for your support.

Regards, François M

[François M]

VBox.log

[François M]

VBoxHardening.log

[François M]

VBox.log.1.log

[François M]

VBox.log.2.log

[François M]

I also tried to activate again Display 3D and 2D acceleration but guest didnt allow me to stop himself properly (black screen). So I uncheck this 2 acceleration checkboxes as before.

[François M]

I use Visual Studio 2015 Community and this product could be the starting point of these VM latencies... Not sure of that. May it help!

[François M]

Ok, may be I've found the solution... Please confirm!

My guest parameters were defined like this: -> System -> Processor

-> Number of processors: 4 for guest / total 8 (as suggested in green by VirtualBox)

-> Allocated ressources: 100% for guest / total 100% available (as suggested in green by VirtualBox)

I changed form 100% allocated to guest to 60% and latency seems to be gone...

Is-it a realistic solution or may be this latency will come back?

Thanks for your feed-back!

[Frank Mehnert]

François, what did you change? Did you limit the Processor "Execution Cap"? The normal setting is 100% and better don't change this setting. Are you saying that you need to set this setting to 60% to prevent these temporary freezes?

[François M]

Yes, I defined a limit on allocated ressources for processors... My screen is in french so, I'm talking about 2nd parmeter (in percents) below System/Processor.

My 60% was a test so I didn't try to define a value near 100%, like 90 or 95...

Another explanation could be the Windows Service "Superfetch" which can take lot of ressources when running (disks and memory) and I've also stop it... Not really sure it's a related to my issue but...

[François M]

Ok, I've tried to go back to 95% and freezes come back. After go back to 70%, it's just useable slowly.

Anyway, I've decided to stop using VirtualBox until these bugs have not fixed.

What is sure now (in my case) is that these freezes are due to Visual Studio: this Visual Studio application requires high availability to disk (writes access) and I suppose this is why we've these freezes.

Please let me know if this fix is solved, i'm ready to be a beta tester again...

regards, François

[Frank Mehnert]

Unfortunately we cannot reproduce this problem so I fear we cannot report any fix.