System ground down to a halt

[MR ZenWiz]

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 12:58 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Those are the classic symptoms of running out of RAM, so the system
> starts swapping memory to disc and gradually the whole machine grinds
> to a halt.  This can be due to either just not having enough ram to do
> all the things you are asking for, or because something is behaving
> badly and consuming more and more memory.  So the first question is
> how much RAM have you got and how much swap is configured?  How much
> memory does the windows VM need?
>
I have 16GB of RAM with almost 13GB of swap space (holdover from when
I only had 8GB - never updated).  I'm running on an i7 (effectively 8
CPUs).

The Win7 VM is allocated 4GB of RAM and 2 CPUs.

The CPU Graph applet was not showing a lot of CPU activity during the
slowdown, but it doesn't show memory in use.

I just added the system monitor applet to have a clue when/if this
happens again.

Thanks.