DO NOT cache plain .hdd file in RAM!

Discussion in 'Feature Suggestions' started by White fox, Dec 8, 2007.

  1. White fox

    White fox Member

    Messages:
    77
    Hi!
    I wish that the usage of my computers RAM was a bit more clever.
    If I assign a plain 32 GB harddrive to a VM then I don´t want Parallels Desktop to cache it in RAM, because there is certainly a great probability that it won´t fit in my iMac 2 GB RAM. I would like to do other things in the background, but when the whole RAM is filled with this buffered file then anything else I work with gets paged out. If I assign a VM a certain amount of RAM and hdd then I don´t expect it to steal all resources from Mac OS. As the case is now, Ubuntu swaps to it´s swap partition and Mac OS swaps as well, making the system unnecessary slow. Can this be fixed or at least an option?
    I´d be glad to get a response to this.
    Thanks.
     
  2. spectre

    spectre Parallels Team

    Messages:
    270
    You can already switch the caching policy.
    It's in VM Configuration Editor - Option - Advanced - Optimize for Mac OS performance.
    This way .hdd file won't be cached.
    But generally caching the .hdd file shouldn't affect the Mac OS performance too much because only unused RAM is allocated to cache. But if you are running two or more VMs simultaneously - then changing caching policy may have a greater impact on performance.
     
  3. White fox

    White fox Member

    Messages:
    77
    Thanks. I just discovered that on my own. I went to this forum just to inform other users about it. However, I´d be nice if there was a hint in the user guide so one didn´t have to find it out themselves.
    Thanks for a great piece of software.
     

Share This Page