System ground down to a halt

[Ralf Mardorf]

>On 19 May 2016 at 01:54, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I had a fair variety of programs running: several terminal windows,
>> a Chrome window, a couple of Seamonkey windows, a VirtualBox Windows
>> 7 VM.

My experiences with Windows running as VBox guest are, that it always
slows down the machine, currently I often use VBox Win 7 with qcow,
not vdi. However, what you describes sounds much like a Mozilla issue,
VBox unlikely does cause such an issue. Sometimes Mozilla based browsers
could make the machine completely unresponsive, this never happens when
using a webkit based browser, such as QupZilla. QupZilla is close to
original Mozilla browsers.

Just a single web site opened with Firefox, Pale Moon, IceCat ... with
some kind of animation could make a machine with a fast CPU and much
RAM slow down, even if nothing else is running. Consider to test
Qupzilla.