Guest freezes under heavy load

[yurivict]

Ubuntu guest froze several times on MacOS host when it was heavily loaded. Load was gcc recompilation and system upgrade at the same time. What is interesting, when progress in the terminal stopped for a long time I was still able to click on the tab and it still switched and then froze completely.

I observe the same on FreeBSD host with Ubuntu and Solaris 11 guests. (I know that FreeBSD isn't officially supported but freezing behavior is consistent with MacOS host). Especially Solaris 11 guest there causes freezes with ~50% chance during gcc rebuild.

I think this is a regression since I never saw this on the earlier versions.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please retry with VBox 4.0.10.

[Mat Schaffer]

This seems similar to what I saw today on 4.1 and 4.0. Usually during an apt-get, the guest would over-consume CPU to the point where the host became unusable. So far the only workaround I've found is to use ​http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html to limit the CPU usage. Even this isn't perfect as the CPU still hits 100% sometimes.

[Mat Schaffer]

yurivict, are you on Mac OS Lion? I seemed to start seeing this is as soon as I switched from Snow Leopard to Lion.