Hey everyone - Hope all is well :-), just curious I've been using Ubuntu 18.04 on my Virtual Box and i must say i'm really enjoying using Ubuntu - however at times it can get really laggy and its annoying :-( , was wondering does the lag have something to do with Virtual Box? if so what other Virtual Machine would you recommend :-)

Cheers :-)

Any particular reason you don't dual boot?

Define "laggy". Is it just UI or the terminal as well?

What's the CPU%? CPU queue? Any errors in dmesg? Any heavy I/O?

Basically run "vmstat 1 20" when it's laggy, upload output to pastebin or so and post the link here

@Stuxnet I'll be 110% honest.. i didn't want to screw it up.. since its my main machine and the first time iI've ever done this. :/

@netikras Lag as you know when i move my browser around or perhaps i want to watch videos etc.. :-)

@KingMilo I mean if you take proper precautions you should be fine.

But I completely understand dude. Thankfully I had an old machine around that I was able to try it out with

@Stuxnet Thank you for understanding - what i;ve done just a couple of minutes ago was go into the virtual machines settings and add more Ram and also another core - it seems to make it run faster :-) - hopefully within the near future i'd like to make it my main machines OS :D

I wouldn't say I'm the most qualified to help with the lag, but if you're running in a VM I'd expect a little lag with the UI at least.

If you're going to switch to Ubuntu as your main OS and you're currently running Windows I'd recommend dual booting and keeping Windows. Even if you're not going to use it, just allocate a little space for it and you'll thank yourself when you have to fix Windows boot records or other crap that it caused itself. Also, some applications still require Windows to run.

@ScriptCoded Thank you for the kind response mate :-) understood, ill just have to go with that option then, and also thanks to everyone else :-)

@KingMilo So it's only graphics laggy, not the system itself then? In that case it's gotta be the VM graphics driver. Do you have guest tools installed? Could be related to ballon service if the issue is intermittent

@netikras Hi mate :-) i appreciate the kind comment, i seem to have fixed the issue - what seemed to be the problem is that i might have not given enough RAM or perhaps maybe an extra core - so i went into the settings of my VM and just added more - now it actually works better :-) cheers

Since Ubuntu 18.04, several critical components of gnome are installed with snap ramdisks instead of on the same storage media as the rest of the operating system. So not having enough memory will definitely show, there. Also, because these design decisions were made by idiots, these ramdisks are version-specific, and are not removed when an update is installed. This means that after a couple years, an Ubuntu install will have dozens of these leftover ramdisks still carved out of your memory, but will only be using a tiny percentage of them for the running desktop. They're easy and safe to remove if you know how, but that's beside the point. You have to know how, and the real shitter is that they just leave them forever by default, as if memory is some kind of bottomless resource.

I goddamned hate gnome.

@bahua Hi Mate :-) i appreciate the kind comment - id like to also say sorry for my late response, i've got 16GB ram on my PC and its quad core - what i've done is allocated 8GB worth of ram onto my VM (This is my only VM) i've also given it an extra core since, meaning i'm using two cores out of 4 - after giving it the boost ive noticed a significant improvement on my machine :-) but i also appreciate your info you have given me, its my first time using linux and really new to all the keywords but really eager to learn :-) cheers. !