Memory leak !!!!

P

peterwor

Hunter
This has been here since the early betas but since the product is now GA and I bought it ealry on I'd like to see if others are seeing the same thing I am, if they are then Parallels has a problem to get corrected.
Using a 1.83Ghz MBP with 2G of RAM. When I boot up I have lets say 1.5G of free memory (use Activity Monitor or Hardware Monitor) after using PD and quitting I'm down to around 600Megs of free memory and it appears to never really get freed back up. To me this is a leak and needs to be corrected.
Is anyone else seeing this behavior?

TIA,
Peter
 
I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that without running Parallels you have 1.5GB free and with Parallels you have little or nothing free?

If so this is completely normal. Obviously Parallels takes a lot of RAM. If that bothers you simply lower the amount of RAM it can use in the Parallels prefs (not the amount of RAM for your virtual machine but the Parallels permitted max ram in prefs->memory).
 
Ok, its not a memory leak. this is behavior by design, of the MacOS X.

Mac Does Not Free up memory UNTIL it needs it, incase the application restarts. Understand when a process is exit from the kernel, the kernel is the one responsible for freeing this up.

There are some docs at apple.com that can go into the detail on how memory management works.

Paul
 
First of all, Maverick I certainly know that PD utilizes memory, that wasn't my question/issue.

I'm also aware that when *nix needs more memory it will release unused but previously allocated blocks that have been marked as 'usable'. The issue seems to be that even though I quit PD and check memeory then I run something like Rosetta (Office 2004) OSX doesn't seem to be releasing that memory but only increases the swap file size or disk memory.
I'm going to ue some of the developer tools to double check this but I was under the impression that although OSX doesn't mark the memory as free it is supposed to mark these blocks are reallocatable it it seems that it isn't.
Thanks anyway for the replies...
Peter
 
I did not mean to imply you didn't know that Parallels takes RAM. I was just asking for clarification on exactly where your concerns lay.

I have checked using Activity Monitor and I am quite certain Parallels is not leaking. It does not consume ever increasing amounts of memory while running and the memory is freed as soon as I quit the app.

True memory leaks are characterised by ever increasing amounts of memory being consumed by the process. For example, if Parallels used 1.5GB when it started but climbed to 2GB after an hour and then 3GB after 2 hours and just kept going then yes there might be a memory leak. However, I do not see this behaviour and I really think Parallels is not leaking. Furthermore, even with actual memory leaks the memory is still freed as soon as you quit the application.
 
Thats pretty much what I'm seeing, an almost linear change in free memory over the time period PD is running and some of it is freed when I quit PD but not al of it. That's what led me to thinking that there is somehting in PD that is slowly leaking memory.
I've almost finished configuring my development system so I can start to really peek around and try and see what it is that's really going on.

Thanks for all the replies,
Peter
 
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