bridged en connect to XP with dual VPN connections make my mac speedy as syrup

running build 3036 on 2Ghz Intel Core Duo, 1.25 GB RAM, 10.4.8.

Have a XP machine set up, allocated 512 mb of RAM, connected to my MAC over Bridged Ethernet ( allows me to set "My Documents" as a mapped drive: my Home folder. Also is the only way I've managed to VPN into my office on both machines.

Things work swimmingly for a time, but inevitably, my mac starts to sound like it's preparing for take-off and the beachball hangs forever. Weirdly, paralells only seems to be taking up about 15%-20% of my system resources, but seems to cause other programs to become memory hogs (e.g. firefox, itunes, photoshop, and top(?!)).

Sometimes disabliing and reabling windows sharing helps, but only temporarily. I've edited .parallels_common_options to AllVMsMemoLimit=512, but the problems is persisting. Any configuration tips you could share would be greatly appreciated.

ThankS!

 

The all VMs limit should be about 100 meg larger than the amount of RAM your VMs actually use (sum of the individual allocations). That may help.

 

Yes, that helping a bit. Still noticing that other programs start leeching more memory than they usually do when paralells is running, and also that the complete system stalls often occur while the XP machine has been lying dormant for a time... is there some reason that the longer I run paralells, the more memory it takes, even if I'm not actively usely a program within?

 

I run a VM for days at a time and it doesn't use more RAM with time, so something else you are running may be interfering. What are you using to measure the amount of RAM it's using?

There have been reports in the past that excluding ~/library/parallels from spotlight frees up processor cycles. (This is your VM directory).

 

Have just been using top.... which oddly enough will start to use upwards of 100% of my resources if left running besides paralellels for too long.

Thanks for the spotligh tip. I should just slay that beast I suppose...