Parallels Desktop Memory Usage Discrepancy

[Rastikan]

Hi there,

Has anyone else noticed discrepancy looking at activity monitor?

At work:
- some iMac running OSX Leopard 32bit
- had 2GB of memory
The VM I am running is:
- Windows 7 32bit
- 1 GB memory
- 1 GB of virtual memory

At home:
- some Intel MacbookPro 2008 running OSX Snow Leopard 64bit
- had 4GB of memory
The VM I am running is (same as above):
- Windows 7 32bit (bootcamp)
- 1.5 GB memory
- 1 GB of virtual memory

Although the actual Activity Monitor numbers aren't 100% clear to me, on the iMac, the prl_vm_app is reported using about 380MB of real memory and 1.6GB of virtual memory which seems right to me.

On the MacbookPro machine, the activity monitor reports about 160-180 MB of real memory and 170-200 MB of virtual memory. That's definitively NOT anything close. In both VM have the same installed softwares.

Anyone has a clue? Why is the figures so wrong on the MBP ?
Is it a Parallels Desktop issue, a Snow Leopard issue or a 32 vs 64 bit issue?

 

[Brian Spolarich]

Similar Question

I have an XP VM that has 2GB of memory allocated (out of 6GB available) and XP says it is using 1GB right now.

I can't find anything in the Activity Monitor that shows real or virtual memory consumption anywhere near that.

I also notice that, somewhat randomly, my Activity Monitor will go from showing 25MB of free memory to 1.5GB although I'm not doing anything much in terms of launching other Mac apps, or doing anything that drastic in the XP guest.

I know there is some confusion in what Activity Monitor shows, as it doesn't account for memory usage by shared libs which are only loaded once, etc. but the memory math makes no sense whatsoever.