windows xp - Why does my guest virtual machine keep freezing?

Background:

In the past when my guest VM froze, I looked at windows task manager and saw very little ram. This led me to conclude "the host put the VM out of physical memory and into virtual memory (i.e. paging) --> therefore the VM froze because it was now running out of paging instead of physical memory".

Current:

Most recently my guest VM froze and looking at task manager revealed that there was plenty of "available memory" 1.2 GB. I have attached the screenshot of my host windows machine and the guest Fedora 14 VM.

My observations:

• the host has plenty of available memory (1.2 GB)


• the guest has plenty of available memory


• the screenshot of the guest... is only available because it was by complete chance on the top and visible


• the host CPU is pegged for 2/4 cores


• guest CPU is not pegged at all

I closed the VM and my host's task manager showed:

• physical memory available went up by exactly the same amount of memory allocated to the guest VM


• paging went went down by exactly the same amount of memory allocated to the guest VM


• CPU usage went from super high to almost nothing

Given the description, why do you think the guest VM froze? I just can not figure this out and I don't have any debugging tools to see what the problem is!

• Is there someway to show that the "virtualbox" process is heavily using the hardisk (i.e. the process is in paging now instead of physical memory?


• How would I show virtual-box is "stuck in paging"?
  
  
  
  • (I have heard of perfmon... but could not figure it out. so please elaborate more than "use perfmon" and say what kind of counters to look at)
  
  

Answer

I am now able to do everything I need to do without any freezing in the guest OS.

Here is the configuration that does not freeze:

• HOST OS: Windows 7 64 bit (Previously: Windows XP 32 bit)


• HOST OS: 8 GB of available memory (Previously: 3GB in Windows XP 32 bit)


• GUEST OS: 1 CPUS/core (Previously: 2 CPUSs/cores)


• HOST OS: VirtualBox version 4.0.8


• HOST MACHINE: Turned off hyper threading

My gut reaction for "what caused the freezing?". Here are the two credible causes:

1. I think the lack of memory caused the freezing.
   
   
   
   • The host OS put the guest OS into paging... and then the guest OS didn't technically freeze... it just got really slow.
   
   


2. OR Using 2 cores in the guest OS caused weird freezing in the VM.
   
   
   
   • I think this is much less likely. Because I was using 2 cores (less than the total number of the host machine)... which is well supported feature in VirtualBox.
   
   

Unfortunately I did not learn enough about debugging techniques to SHOW which was the TRUE cause... these are just my best guesses.