I've been running VmWare on a Windows machine for quite some time and the memory usage there was about the same as the memory set for the virtual machine. However, on Mac OSX using Parallels Desktop I am starting out with about 1GB of memory usage for a VM with 1GB memory, but after a few hours it climbs up to 2GB. Since I have several other busy apps running at the same time, I am experiencing massive slowdowns after a while. Is there a way to limit or improve the memory usage of Parallels Desktop (not the VM, but for Parallels itself)?
use at your own risk, i can not promise this won't completely wreck parallels and/or your mac: in the directory /Library/Preferences/Parallels/ there is a file called dispatcher.desktop.xml one of the nodes is MemoryPreferences here is what mine has: <MemoryPreferences AdjustMemAuto_patch="1" dyn_lists=""> <AdjustMemAuto>1</AdjustMemAuto> <ReservedMemoryLimit>3072</ReservedMemoryLimit> <ReservedMemoryMin>96</ReservedMemoryMin> <ReservedMemoryMax>3072</ReservedMemoryMax> <MinVmMemory>4</MinVmMemory> <MaxVmMemory>8192</MaxVmMemory> <RecommendedMaxVmMemory>2304</RecommendedMaxVmMemory> <HostRamSize>4096</HostRamSize> </MemoryPreferences> i'm betting if you adjust the ReservedMemoryMax and ReservedMemoryLimit to something less - say closer to the 1024 you're looking for it will choke parallels down to that limit. you might have to alter the AdjustMemAuto node as well and if you limit parallels to 1gb, you'll want to lower the memory on your VM as well. this used to be a configurable option in Parallels 5, but the dialog appears to have been removed in 6.
