Optimal Settings

Hi,

I use Parallels on my Mac to run Windows. In Windows, I run a stock trading program. At 9:30AM when the market opens, the program is practically frozen because of all the trades being monitored. Currently, my Parallels is set to 1G for RAM. I tried upping this to 4G and it made it worse. What can I do to give Parallels enough memory to handle this stock trading program at 9:30AM?

Thanks,
Alice

 

What Windows version are you running? (different versions have different memory requirements, 1 GB works for XP, isn't enough for Vista)
Is it 64bit? (64 bit versions of Windows require more RAM to run smoothly, typically more than 2 GB)
How much physical RAM does the Mac have? (You should leave about 4 GB for OS X)
Have you tried assigning 2 GB?
Have you tried starting the VM sooner than 9:30AM?

 

I am running Windows 7 32 bite. The Mac has 4 gig of Ram. As I mentioned, I assigned 4 gig of RAM and it was worse than 1 gig. When I look at Task Manager it says 1 Gig available. My trading program takes up 136K. I have a Visual Basic program running also at 9:30 that is getting quotes. So I think the 2 together is too much for Parallels to handle as is. I leave the VM running all the time.

 

* Of course it was worse than 1GB if the Mac only has 4 GB, you aren't leaving anything for OS X, this conflicts with running the VM. Don't forget the computer is now running two OSes in parallel and you have to have a value that balances the 2.

*It doesn't matter how big the app inside is, we are talking about the load of the whole OS.

* I suggest you try to assign 1.5 GB to the VM. More than that will make everything slower because the Mac side will have too little RAM. You can try closing apps, specially internet browsers with many tabs, on the mac side to free up RAM.

* I should mention that 4 GB RAM on the computer is the absolute minimum to run Parallels, I normally recommend at least 6 GB, in order to give 2 GB to the VM and 4 GB to OS X, OS X Mavericks likes a lot of RAM.

 

Sorry, I have 8 gig of RAM not 4 gig. I initially set it to 4 gig and it seemed worse. I changed it to 2 gig and I allocated 2 CPU's. I will see if this is better.