Firefox Hangs Laptop, Virtualbox crashes

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1

Hi guys,

I need help with figuring out what might be hanging or causing my laptop to freeze. My guess is it is my Firefox browser but this only started after I upgraded to LEAP 15.1 two weeks ago. When Mozilla Firefox (version 60.7.2esr) hangs, Oracle Virtualbox (Version 6.0.10 r132072 [Qt5.9.7]) crashes.
I apologize as I am not certain of which logs to look at but I will share any more info as requested. Also how best can I optimize my browser?
I’d appreciate your help as this has given me problems all week.

2

How much memory do you have and how much set in VB.

I had a problem like this many versions back and it was a amount of memory problem Either FF or VB does not like to use swap. I had 2 gig at the time installed 8 gig and have not seen the problem since.

3

If memory availability is the problem,
Then you can also severely reduce the amount of memory your graphics environment uses by booting to IceWM instead of KDE or Gnome (other Desktops also, but use considerably less RAM).

TSU

4

From past experience

Firefox will hang if you don’t have enough swap - it does not use it but it allocates based on it - if you have the disk space you should allocate at least 4gb or as much as the ram you have if you hibernate your computer.

15.1 VirtualBox is at 6.0.8 - I would stick to the OpenSUSE supported VBox - It still has choppy sound in the clients but does not lock up.

I tried the UEFI 15.1 and it kept locking up my 7420 laptop - when installed in Legacy mode the laptop ran without “hangs”. It should not make any differences but apparently there are some access differences and the latest BIOS did not cure them.

All UEFI seems to do is make Microsoft Windows harder to steal. It wastes disk space by requiring an FAT file system to boot from so it can find an .efi file to boot.

5

Hi
Change the swapiness… with vm.swappiness and vm.vfs_cache_pressure sysctl settings?


free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:       15916796     3190632     5372016      473176     7354148    11904252
Swap:       1379904           0     1379904

Not sure, no issues here with either windows on the hardware or in a vm (even autoactivates if the host has been activated). Lots of advantages with a gpt disk, all those extra partitions, no boot sector, boot from a file… Older UEFI BIOS implementations can be quirky though, check for BIOS updates for the system.

6

I thank you all for your input and i truly I apologize for the delayed response. Below’s my machine’s stats; I gave 2GB memory to Virtualbox.

 
sharone@doofenshmirtz~$ cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:        8064988 kB
MemFree:         1698128 kB
MemAvailable:    2662936 kB
Buffers:           87236 kB
Cached:          1199880 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:          2876584 kB
Inactive:        1037684 kB
Active(anon):    2478208 kB
Inactive(anon):   287788 kB
Active(file):     398376 kB
Inactive(file):   749896 kB
Unevictable:          96 kB
Mlocked:              96 kB
SwapTotal:       2097148 kB
SwapFree:        2097148 kB
Dirty:              2788 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:       2374348 kB
Mapped:          2726480 kB
Shmem:            138856 kB
Slab:             148580 kB
SReclaimable:      77972 kB
SUnreclaim:        70608 kB
KernelStack:       11728 kB
PageTables:        63004 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     6129640 kB
Committed_AS:    9657048 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:           0 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
AnonHugePages:    417792 kB
ShmemHugePages:        0 kB
ShmemPmdMapped:        0 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
DirectMap4k:      163536 kB
DirectMap2M:     4982784 kB
DirectMap1G:     3145728 kB

I am going to install Vbox 15.0

7

Thanks. I haven’t been able to find Virtualbox 15.1 so I’ll stick with the current version. Let me see if I can add more to swap for now.

8

For OpenSUSE 15.1

The repos have VirtualBox 6.0.8 - do not install the rpm from VirtualBox

install VirtualBox from command line as root (you can sudo it)

zypper in -f virtualbox

should install the OpenSUSE VirtualBox 6.0.8

9

You misunderstood. “15.1” likely refers to the openSUSE version, not VBox.
Recommend Larry’s recommendation, install VBox 6.0 from the openSUSE repos.

TSU