Parallels Crashes after Mavericks returns from sleep

I'm running Parallels 9.0.24217, OSX 10.9.2, and Windows 7 Home Edition Premium as the guest OS in Coherence mode. The Windows app running is QGIS 2.2, which is an open source GIS workstation which is reasonably stable, though it does crash from time to time on its own.

So far, the problem seems related to Mavericks going to sleep. If I leave QGIS and Win7 open and go away for a while, when I come back to the iMac, it gives me an "Application Memory Full" error. Things are completely frozen unless I force quit both QGIS and Parallels, in which case OSX seems fine (though I've always rebooted anyway). So far, while I've crashed QGIS on its own many times, Win7 isn't affected. This Mavericks/Parallels problem has only come up after a wakeup, never when I'm actively using the system.

Anyone ideas about what might be going on? This started happening after I installed .NET 3.5 in Windows, though QGIS doesn't use that framework so it's probably just a coincidence. However, the problem just started recently... when originally installed Parallels seemed very well behaved.

 

Well, just an update.

I called AppleCare, and they had me reboot while holding down the Option-Cmd-P-R keys (you hold them down when you power up the system, and continue to hold until you hear the SECOND set of chimes). This clears a memory cache that, if corrupted at start up, gives Mavericks trouble.

This seemed to stabilize my system and it didn't crash for a while.

Then I again ran the program I referred to above, which uses .NET, and my system crashed within minutes. So I rebooted, clearing memory again, and will uninstall this program (ArcGIS Explorer). BTW, this program is supposed to require WIN7 Pro, and I'm running WIN7 Home. And it seemed to work, but maybe it's part of the reason for this horrible memory leak. I'm hoping the problem won't recur as long as I don't run ArcGIS Explorer again.

If everything goes OK, this will be my last post. If I continue to have problems, you'll probably seem some more postings here.

 

Humans are by nature optimists, which explains why gambling is such a huge industry. Anyway, literally seconds after posting the above comment my system froze up again.

Back to AppleCare. They had me boot up in Safe Mode (hold shift key down when you power up). Then Option Click on the Finder's Go Menu to show the Library link in the finder.

Two folders in the library: 1) Caches and 2) Saved Application State. Enter each, cmd-A to select all of the subfolders contained in each, and move them to trash.

Then reboot. Empty trash after rebooting.

We'll see if it helps.

 

Nope. Perhaps it's a little more stable and takes longer to crash, but it's still crashing. A couple of new points worth mentioning. This time I was using QGIS in standard mode (not coherence mode) to see if it made a difference. It still crashed... it did work fine, then I left my system on when I went to dinner. When I returned to continue working, the system gave me the memory full error. So Coherence, non-Coherence both give a problem.

Since I spend most of my time right now on QGIS, I don't have many examples of working without parallels active. However, I can say that 1) Mavericks has run out of memory ONLY when Parallels is active; however, 2) there is at least one example where Parallels/Win 7 was active, but QGIS was not. In that case I was actually working in Mac Excel 2011 when I got the memory full error. I believe I had used QGIS earlier in the session and then shut it down, leaving Parallels/Win7 active but without an open app.

 

Problem is solved. Wasn't Parallels after all, though it may be related to Parallels tools.

Breakthrough came when I was measuring memory usage in Windows while running QGIS, looking for a memory leak. Didn't find one (Windows usage was completely flat) right up until I got a memory full error from OSX. So clearly the problem was on the Mavericks side.

Ran Activity Monitor.app on Mavericks. Ultimately, showing All Processes, found a process called photosmart (presumably an obsolete driver for my HP photosmart printer) that was allocating about half a gig of memory per minute for no reason, and ran continually, ultimately stealing all of my application memory. This is a 24GB system, and Parallels is allocating 16GB to Windows7 when it runs. So it simply was running out of memory faster when running Parallels, which is why it seemed to be the culprit.

The AppleCare technician I was working with can't actually find where the driver is (the file isn't obvious when doing a spotlight search). He's escalated it to Apple Engineering, and we'll presumably find it when they respond. For now, as a workaround, whenever I log in, I open Activity Monitor, click on All Processes, double click on the photosmart process and click on Quit, selecting "force quit". That shuts it down for the session and my memory usage drops to a normal level.

When I went to see if I could use the printer, I found there was a parallels print job that was trying to run.... I don't think I've ever tried to print from parallels, there it was. It's now deleted. That was maybe why the job was continually allocating memory.

 

I too was having Crash issues when returning from "sleep" or after a 1-2 hour period of use. Finding no common denominator,..I deleted the Windows 7 partition and reinstalled it. No issues since. I have no idea what it could have been.

I did go to the Apple store and met with a Mac Genius. he ran software that checked the equipment and found no issues, so it was a software/driver issue. Also did a PRAM & SMC reset.

Ghost in the machine?

 

This is what worked for me:


I had the same problem.. try reducing your video memory to 128MB.