Virtualbox issues

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A generic query regarding the “reliability” of Virtualbox, in the Opensuse environment.

Have been running Virtualbox for many years, originally on the Leap platform, but for quite a while now, on Tumbleweed, and on various hardwares, mostly Dell, but other variants as well, and it has always been a less than ideal application. Have also tried different “versions” of Virtual box, itself - the one in the local repos/the one available for download from VirtualBox/the ‘generic’ (ie ​"All distributions (built on EL7 and therefore not requiring recent system libraries)" one available for download from VirtualBox, etc.
When it works, it works quite well/does what I want, but… can guarantee that if I try and run it for an extended (several hours) period, my system will lock up, with the hdd’s trying to beat themselves to death - ie hdd light hard on, unable to even move the mouse, let alone break in and get a response - only solution is to perform a hard reset on the host.
Have tried many and varied things over the years, but never found a solution.
Originally I thought it was mainly when running a Windows Guest, but these days that is definitely NOT the case. (eg yesterday, running the new Zorin18Core, the other day, Mint…) Also, at one stage thought it may be caused by other apps (Thunderbird/browser) on the system, but have also ruled this out.
So… surely I am not the only one with these issues? Maybe I am, but how have I reintroduced the issues on new hardware/OS/software after totally new installs?
Anyone have any ideas/clues to maybe work around this, or are there any other recommended apps out there for running virtual machines, that, preferably, I can import an existing disk to.
Thanks.

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The HDD seems to be the main bottleneck. An additional factor is, how much virtual RAM and cores you have dedicated to your VMs. It is possible (and likely with seemingly old HW), that the VM eats up the ressources of your host.

Try to lower the settings of new VMs (RAM and cores). I use VB for fast testing of reported bugs, recreating user issues, testing other distributions, and don’t see such issues. But i use it on hosts with SSDs instead of old HDDs and i give max 2 cores and 8 GB RAM per VM. This is enough.

On a really old laptop, which i do no longer use, i was only able to run two VMs in parallel or it got really slow due to the limited HW of the Host (2 cor Intel with 8GB RAM). So HW of the host limits what you can do with VMs.

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Thanks for the reply…
If anything, I probably under-allocate resources.
Host has 16gb RAM, generally only allocate MAX 4-6gb ram, hdd 50gb max, so main machine, I would think, should still have plenty of resources, to keep it out of trouble…?
Only ever allocate 1CPU…
Only ever run 1x virtual machine at a time.
The allocated HDDs are all located on an SSD, these days, obviously a few years back they weren’t.
Would love to sort this out, but as I say, has been an issue now for ‘years’.