VirtualBox hangs my computer

[szx]

I'm using VirtualBox on a Linux desktop machine to run Windows 8.1. It works pretty great except it often completely hangs the host machine so that I have nothing other to do than kill VirtualBox. Sometimes even killing it is impossible because my keyboard stops responding and I can't switch to the TTY, only hard reboot helps.

I think it might be freezing because of high disk usage (based on the LED on my computer's front panel). This seems to happen totally randomly, sometimes while the guest is still booting, other times when I'm editing something in Visual Studio (I have to use it for work).

My current host system is Fedora 21 (x86-64) but I had exactly the same problem on Ubuntu 14.04 with different versions of VirtualBox.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please attach a VBox.log file from such a VM session.

[szx]

Sorry, I can't attach the log file as my hard drive eventually died a few days after I reported this bug, and I didn't install VirtualBox again after that. I guess it could be the reason why my system used to freeze so often.

[Frank Mehnert]

Ok, in that case let's close this ticket. Please reopen if appropriate and provide a VBox.log file in that case.

[szx]

I bought a new hard drive and this is happening again. I'm almost certain it only happens on my Windows 8.1 guest.

Also there doesn't seem to be a VBox.log file but I found VBoxSVC.log - is that it? Anyway, I attached that file.

[szx]

Got another crash - this time it ran out of memory, not sure if the same issue. Last 2 lines of dmesg say:

[18401.408977] Out of memory: Kill process 23279 (VirtualBox) score 593 or sacrifice child [18401.409015] Killed process 23279 (VirtualBox) total-vm:6095736kB, anon-rss:161204kB, file-rss:3446460kB [18401.527353] vboxnetflt: 6 out of 243978 packets were not sent (directed to host)

[szx]

Sorry, I forgot to reopen this. Not sure if you were notified of my new comments, so here you go.

[Frank Mehnert]

What happens if you disable 3D in the VM settings? The error you observed (Out of memory) sounds rather like your host computer runs out of memory, either because you have too many applications open or if there is a memory leak. Do you run any memory-intensive application in parallel with VirtualBox?