Win10 6.1.18 host hanging during guest startup / pausing / shutdown, excessive disk read seen

[Grrrrrrr]

When I upgrade from 6.1.16 on win10 to 6.1.18, 6.1.19-142777, or 6.1.97-142300 then my Linux and Win10 guests stop responding for a while during startup, shutdown and every time the VM is Paused.

During the entirity of the time the VM is not responding, Task Manager on the host shows Disk reads for the VirtualBox process jump to 600MBytes/sec. Writes stay at close to zero. The duration of the non-responsiveness when Pausing both tested VMs corresponds with the size of the VM.

IE every time I Pause the Ubuntu Linux guest, it take 15 seconds of reading @ 600MB/sec to Puase, while the VM size is ~=9GB. Likewise it takes ~50 seconds to Pause my ~30GB Win10 VM.

From observing the Disk status on Task Manager, whatever triggers the hang/reads seems to happen 2-3 times during VM start up and 1-2 times during shutdown.

vbox.log on 6.1.18 (see attached) shows entries like:

• AsyncCompletion: Task 0x0000000762df00 completed after 16 seconds

• VD#0: Aborted read (0 bytes left) returned rc=VERR_PDM_MEDIAEX_IOREQ_CANCELED

However, during pausing of the VM no errors are seen in the log file - just that PDMR3Suspend took 15 seconds instead of 50 milliseconds.

The Ubuntu guest sometimes has a console message about disk that I couldn't capture. One boot it came up with / readonly due to needing fs check.

I don't see the same issue occur using 6.1.18 on Win8.1. It pauses (in well under 1 second), boots and shuts down swiftly as expected with minimum disk reads.

[Grrrrrrr]

VirtualBox-6.1.19-142995-Win still appears to be reading what could be the whole VM image (and is unresponsive while doing so) during start up, pausing (but not unpausing) and powering off all my VMs on Win 10 Enterprise 1909.

Still no problem after I revert to VirtualBox-6.1.16-140961-Win

[Grrrrrrr]

Tried VirtualBox-6.1.19-143492-Win - it still has the issue.

As an example, the hang/reads occurs 2-3 times during startup of an Ubuntu VM. It happens every time I Pause the VM. It also occurs at shutdown - as soon as the Ubuntu console says it's powering off the machine. Perhaps it occurs during cache flush?

6.1.16 still fine.

[Grrrrrrr]

VirtualBox-6.1.19-143777-Win has the issue still. Going back to 6.1.16 release fixes it still.

[Grrrrrrr]

Still happening with 6.1.22 release.

No-one else on win10 (1909) noticed the VM hanging / big host disk reads, particular while pausing?

[Iron Man 74]

I also have this exact same problem and have had to revert back to 6.1.16 (thanks for your post). All of my linux VMs (and possibly the Windows) guests were having hangs during the boot process. They would usually time out and finish booting, but once one of my RHEL 8.2 guests reported a hung CPU during boot. It would take 3 or 4 times longer than normal to boot my guests. Reverting to 6.1.16 and rolling back the Guest Additions to 6.1.16 as well seemed to fix the problem.

This is definitely still a problem in the Windows version.

[RocketDevil]

Sadly that's still an occurring issue, I seen it jumping high at 870MB write usage(1MB read usage) on the host hard drive, and with that VM just freezes itself..

[Grrrrrrr]

Still happening on 6.1.34a (now under Win10 21H2) - still fixed when I roll back to 6.1.16.

Discussion on the forum ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=102549&p=499335 after opening this ticket suggest it could be caused by security software installed (which I can't disable.)