I believe I'm seeing a memory leak of some sort in Parallels/Mac build 3170. Is anyone else seeing this behavior? I'm looking in the “Activity Monitor†app in the System Memory area. When I launch a VM the “wired†memory balloons as expected. When I suspend the wired memory is released and shrinks to the Pre-parallels value. Nothing wrong here. The problem is that upon suspend the “active†memory category increases by the size of the VM and sometimes stays there (no Parallels process is running at this point!). If I resume that VM the excess “active†memory appears to be moved to “wiredâ€. But if I again suspend the VM (quitting Parallels entirely) once again “active†memory may be left too large by the size of the VM. Sometimes this doesn't happen. Sometimes whatever is stuck in “active†memory seems to work loose after the VM is resumed/suspended again. I haven't figured out exactly what makes it happen or not. Running a VM over and over seems to result in no more than a single large “leak†event in “active†System Memory (as large as the VM). But if I run a different VM it too may suffer the “single large leak†symptom, resulting in “active†being hit by the size of both VMs combined. And so forth... At some point, after starting enough different VMs, Mac OS X hangs. Running the same VM over and over doesn't do this – they must be different VMs. I have 2 GB of physical RAM and my VMs use 512 MB of virtual memory apiece. Also note no more than one instance of Parallels is running at a time – the VMs are run sequentially, not in parallel.
I have seen this as well I've locked up my computer 2 or 3 times trying to run XP and one or more linux versions at once... At first I wasn't sure that it was parallels, as I hadn't rebooted my machine in weeks, but I have reproduced it a few times now, only when parallels is running so I'm pretty sure something is going on.
