Comment 53 for bug 1861359

Using 5.4.0-17.21-generic, my laptop has 16G of ram. If I launch 3 vms (xenial desktop (768M), bionic desktop (1.5G) and focal desktop (2.6G)) then load this page: https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/oval/com.ubuntu.xenial.cve.oval.xml, at some point while the page is loading, the desktop interactivity degrades. top tells me I am swapping 2.5G. (I have other tabs open in firefox of course). Eventually the system settles down and interactivity is decent again.

top - 07:59:36 up 4 days, 21:27, 1 user, load average: 2.37, 2.69, 2.43
Tasks: 456 total, 2 running, 454 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 10.8 us, 8.1 sy, 0.0 ni, 79.1 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 2.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 15859.5 total, 3358.4 free, 10540.5 used, 1960.5 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 16232.0 total, 13749.7 free, 2482.2 used. 4008.9 avail Mem

    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 200286 jamie 20 0 9007480 4.2g 159064 S 0.0 27.3 6:36.74 Web Content
 410962 libvirt+ 20 0 3428276 572112 956 S 0.0 3.5 0:16.71 qemu-system-+
 199841 jamie 20 0 3704896 502596 138168 S 2.7 3.1 34:35.49 firefox-bin
   6292 jamie 20 0 1173892 481776 2760 S 0.0 3.0 0:33.38 gnome-softwa+
 270490 jamie 20 0 2855220 453944 52804 S 0.0 2.8 5:28.90 chrome
   4798 jamie 20 0 4703264 386268 102868 S 10.7 2.4 123:08.13 gnome-shell
 200005 jamie 20 0 3168928 383332 82760 S 1.3 2.4 8:57.08 Web Content
 411248 libvirt+ 20 0 5171760 376240 1152 S 14.7 2.3 1:01.78 qemu-system-+
 200257 jamie 20 0 3072596 346168 36604 S 4.0 2.1 18:06.12 Web Content
 411125 libvirt+ 20 0 3944844 296928 2248 R 2.7 1.8 0:42.79 qemu-system-+
 200235 jamie 20 0 3129932 293856 135852 S 0.0 1.8 8:12.52 Web Content
 200198 jamie 20 0 2980312 268940 40484 S 1.3 1.7 13:50.98 Web Content
   5396 jamie 20 0 1032416 250628 0 S 0.0 1.5 11:31.16 multipass.gui
 200112 jamie 20 0 3001112 246340 42248 S 0.0 1.5 3:49.98 WebExtensions
 185759 jamie 20 0 2350136 159272 3984 S 0.0 1.0 2:57.77 rhythmbox
   4458 jamie 20 0 1161904 158884 124960 S 12.0 1.0 172:18.63 Xorg
...