Chrome in guest kills the VM

[qhartman]

I have an Ubuntu 18.04 VM that I move between a MBP running Fusion 11.x on Catalina and a Linux machine running Workstation Pro 15.x on Ubuntu 20.04. I have the VM stored on a USB 3.1 SSD. On either machine, I frequently run into cases where some heavy web app in Chrome will bring the VM to a screeching halt. Sometimes if I wait long enough things will recover and I can continue using the VM, but often I have to kill it. If I pop out to the host and look at system stats, the VM appears to be consuming all the CPU it possibly can.

I have the VM configured to use 12GB of RAM and 2 CPUs with 3D acceleration enabled. The VM has about a GB of swap setup internally, and the Linux workstation has about 10GB of swap on it's internal SSD, and 32GB of physical RAM. If I'm only running Chrome in the VM it seems to take longer for the problem to occur, and the problem seems to have been becoming more frequent in the last couple of weeks, but that's anecdotal at best.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Would love some suggestions for tweaks that might improve the situation.

[qhartman]

Just a minor update. I did some poking through the VMWare logs over the weekend and I didn't find anything that looked like a smoking gun. Lots of things that appeared to be potential errors, but nothing that was unique to the periods when the VM is having issues. Lots of traffic like:

`2020-04-17T15:01:56.008-06:00| vcpu-1| W115: USBGL: failed to discard urb (device 17): Invalid argument`

and

`2020-04-16T10:13:16.627-06:00| svga| I125: MainMem: Failed to map 0x1000 bytes to paging file, 'Cannot allocate memory' (12).`

Though the second one has gotten less frequent since I reduced the RAM allocated to video from 768 to 512.