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Jan 10, 2007, 05:20 PM
#28  

rhind
Member


Join: Dec 2006
Posts: 84
Responding to Tim Surgent:

I have the same memory issue. I'm running 3106 on an MBP C2D 2.33GHz with 2Gb RAM. I have 768Mb assigned to the VM which is Windows XP SP2. It has 3 80Gb hard-disks, each with about 9Gb used (I'm not using BootCamp). I basically only run Borland C++Builder 6 and Visual Studio 2005 for windows development. Both these can start eating up quite a bit of RAM (150MB+ according to windows task manager) but the OS should still have plenty left even beyond this.

But Parallels can quickly get to 1Gb RAM usage. I have the cache policy set to Mac OS X (not the default) which helps with the memory usage and helps OS X be a bit more responsive when the VM is running.

I do use coherence - I also have the issue with coherence where the desktop starts to show through when I terminate an app being debugged. It looks as though coherence doesn't recognise the app has gone (because it wasn't exited gracefully) and so still things it should display that part of the windows screen. Could this be anything to do with it?

I have tried with and without shared folders and still have the issue.

I'm using shared networking.

I had at one point upped the RAM for the VM to 1024MB but after a short while (roughly 1hr debugging in Windows), the whole MBP would become unresponsive. It would take make over 10minutes to get activity monitor running as I'd just get constant spinning beach ball from all OS X apps. When i finally got activ monitor running, everything was fairly idle, but as soon as I tried to do anything (activate app, move over dock, click spotlight etc) the spinning beach ball would return and it would be kernel task using most of the processor usage. Exiting Parallels fixed this problem. The other time it happened, I couldn't get enough response from the system to exit parallels so ended up killing power to the laptop.

I've since dropped the VM memory back to 768Mb and haven't had this issue again but Parallels is still typically using over 1Gb or RAM after a short while.

The other item people seem to notice problems with while Parallels is running is Rosetta (MS Office apps in particular). I've had issues with these too while Parallels is running. It got to the stage to day where entourage crashed and then no Rosetta app would launch until I rebooted. Then all were fine again. I haven't had this Rosetta issue without parallels running, but it has only happened once.

Cheers

Russell