System completely hangs, high disk I/O when running a VirtualBox VM alongside Firefox with a few tabs open

[Wes]

Experienced complete system lockup and hang on two different machines when trying to boot a VirtualBox VM running Fedora 29 live (no virtual disk) when Firefox is open with a few (~5-10) inactive tabs.

System 1:
4GB RAM host
1536MB guest, no virtual disk
swapfile

System 2:
6 GB RAM host
1792MB guest, no virtual disk
separate swap partition (4GB)

- Load Fedora in guest from live ISO

On boot of the guest (after boot menu), the entire system locks up for easily 30 minutes or more, with constant host disk activity. GNOME shell becomes completely unresponsive, can move the cursor some but interacting doesn't work and the UI shell doesn't respond to mouse hover. Requires closing the lid to attempt force sleep and resume to be able to regain access to the applications and GNOME shell. After resuming, VM seems to be usable.

Seems like the system is running low on memory but not handling/terminating applications, and thrashing, and/or there are bad memory leaks happening when booting the VM.

Expected behaviour:
Runs normally or fails out of memory without locking up the entire system.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: virtualbox 5.2.18-dfsg-2~ubuntu18.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-23.25-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-23-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Wed Jan 2 22:16:38 2019
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-06-13 (203 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: virtualbox
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

When the problem happens, please run (on the host):

  free -m

and

  ps auxw

and send us the output from both.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-shell (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for virtualbox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]