When opening second VM everything starts to become very laggy

User Support
1

Hi,
Happy to be on this community using this awesome OS.

I’m having an issue with it. When using the browser (for work, teams [inside the browser] and other tabs) everything seems to work well. If I’ll open another VM (personal) everything start to be laggy

work vm: 10 CPUs and 32GB Ram
personal vm: 5 CPUs and 8 GB Ram

Laptop spec:

  • Thinkpad E16 Gen 2
  • 64GB Ram
  • Ultra 7 155H

On the browser I disabled hardware acceleration but no help
What can I do to improve the performance as when I used fedora everything worked normal but now with Qubes OS 4.3.1 (latest) when opening second VM I start to have an extrem lag

Thank you

2

That’s a lot of RAM and VCPUs assigned per-vm. Do you really need 32G and 10 vCPUs for your work VM?

3 Likes
3

I dropped it to 6 and 24gb ram and personal to 2 and 8GB ram
I also dropped sys-firewall to 1GB (had 4Gb) and only 1 vcpu (sys-net, sys-usb and sys-firewall)

4

Is actually better so I guess I’ll need a laptop with a better CPU for better performance

5

I have 10 cores and don’t have such severe problems.
Usually it’s when swap is kicking in VM that I observe some lags (and YT video - notorious) and I have i5-1245U with low TDP that power throttle aggressively.

1 Like
6

you have in total 10 cores not per vm
i guess if I can pin P cores to the work vm will be even better but don’t know exactly (yet) how to do so :smiley:

7

Found something that looks to be done by @Atrate

Thanks

2 Likes
8

Is actually better so I guess I’ll need a laptop with a better CPU for better performance

@JustBe With the Ultra 7 155H and 64G of RAM you should be able to run Qubes without many problems. That’s my hardware set-up as well and I run an up to 18 Qubes simultaneously without issues.

I do make heavy use of helper scripts that I’ve written or adapted, though :). Here’s a link to them all: GitHub - Atrate/qubes-utils: Meta-repo to provide links to Qubes utilities I've written · GitHub

As far as CPU performance goes, the real killer on new CPUs and QubesOS is thermal throttling. I’ve managed to mostly get around that by tweaking cpufreq parameters in dom0 like this (you need to do it on every boot):

xenpm set-cpufreq balance energy-perf:224

This will make the CPU draw less power which results in slightly less responsiveness when under little load, but helps a ton when under high load.

1 Like
9

After changing the CPU and Mem everything started to work well (pined P cores to work vm as well)
But still the problem occurs when I’ll enter into a teams call (via browser) on the work vm
Everything starts to be very slow while the call

10 
xenpm set-cpufreq balance energy-perf:224

regarding this command, it will fail on all cores with operation not supported or invalid argument

11

It should fail on cores 1, 3, 5, 7, 17, 19 and it’s fine to ignore that.

12

that’s a huge overallocation on CPU, and very likely on RAM as well.

Such machine should be able to handle 15+ VMs at the same time.
That’s what I have currently, where my sys-* VMs are limited to ~300MB the ‘real’ appVMs vary from 2G to 8G max.

For vCPU: 2 is the default and a very good starting point.

Then - if you see the increased CPU usage for any of your VM - you migh increase it accordingly.
My ‘biggest’ AppVM has 4 vCPU and 8 G of RAM - just for comparision :slight_smile:

And yes, I do use MS Teams from google chrome, and other online meetings with camera and sound on a 4K external display.

2 Likes
13

You could also read this topic:

as there are testing of various xenpm settings and it’s meaning for CPU + some udev rules to set separate settings automatically whenever you work on AC or battery.

14

Since the remaining slowdown is specifically during a Teams call, I would test it as a media/WebRTC problem, not only as a generic “too few cores” problem. Keep the VM at modest values first, e.g. 2-4 vCPUs and enough RAM, then watch qvm-top or xentop while joining a call.

A few variables worth changing one at a time: turn off camera background blur/effects, lower the camera resolution if Teams allows it, try the same call in Chromium vs Firefox, and test with the external display unplugged if you use one. If the whole GUI lags while one browser tab is doing video encode/decode, that points more to CPU scheduling/thermal/display overhead than to the personal VM itself.

1 Like