Real Memory - Slow Performance

G

glose

Bit poster
I have XP in a VM - allocated 1.5 GB of RAM to it - Mac system has 4 GB total. The VM loads fine but when I use Visual Studio it becomes very slow - at one time this ran very well.

I did a little digging and noticed that in the OS X Activity Monitor Parallels Desktop is allocated 159 MB of Real Memory and 2.58 GB of Virtual. The amount of Real Memory used doesn't flucuate by much while I use the VM. This seems odd as I have allocated 1.5 GB. If I watch Disk Activity in Activity Monitor any action in the VM results in a ton of disk activity.

Any ideas ? Like I said at one point this ran great but now it's become almost unusable.
 
Pure random guess, but 1.5 G and 159 M seem suspiciously similar to make me wonder if the settings files the configures RAM somehow became corrupted and the value in the config file is being read a 159M.
 
Try allocating 1GB only, this is what I use and it works very well, and I spend my work days almost completely in VS2005.

Also make sure you configure your Windows for minimum eye candy and that you get rid of all non-essential services.
 
Tx for the suggestions - no matter what I switch the allocated memory to parallels still reports about 159 MB of real ram used + a very large virtual memory setting.

Windows itself reports having whatever setting Ive used as RAM so windows is seeing my setting.
 
Ihave just 312Mb RAM allocated. When I want allocate more mem. I get a message;The max ram for your computer is 312 if more-the system will nit start. I have 2gb ram installed.Do u have any idea
 
glose said:
I have XP in a VM - allocated 1.5 GB of RAM to it - Mac system has 4 GB total. The VM loads fine but when I use Visual Studio it becomes very slow - at one time this ran very well.

I did a little digging and noticed that in the OS X Activity Monitor Parallels Desktop is allocated 159 MB of Real Memory and 2.58 GB of Virtual. The amount of Real Memory used doesn't flucuate by much while I use the VM. This seems odd as I have allocated 1.5 GB. If I watch Disk Activity in Activity Monitor any action in the VM results in a ton of disk activity.

Any ideas ? Like I said at one point this ran great but now it's become almost unusable.
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I wouldn't worry too much about the Real vs. Virtual memory readings in Activity Monitor. All OSs optimize physical RAM by paging currently-unused chunks to disk. If Windows sees the expected amount of RAM, that piece of the puzzle is probably OK. I feed Parallels 1 GB and Activity Monitor rarely reports more than a few hundred MB of Real memory in use, with usually a couple GB of Virtual.

I also run VS 2005 and I beat on it pretty hard, with no ill effects. You mentioned that it used to run fine. Couple of questions. Does VS bomb out mostly when debugging or is it a more general phenomenon? How are you fixed for free disk space (both OS X and Windows)? Does defragmenting Windows help at all? Have you run chkdsk to see if there's any disk corruption on the virtual Windows disk? What about Visual Studio plugins? Some of those can bring VS to its knees.
 
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