Why such a huge .mem file?

N

n9yty

Member
I'm using a BootCamp installation, and when I start up the VM, Parallel's Desktop creates a HUGE .mem file on my MacOS X drive in the ~/Library/Parallels/{vmnamehere}/ directory. I don't have a lot of space on my host drive, so when it tries to create the ~1.5GB file it caused the VM to crash, and damaged my Windows XP install.

Why is a ~1.5GB .mem file needed? Can it be turned off? I don't recall having this problem up through Beta2, it seems new in Beta3.
 
I just trashed mine.
It appeared after closing Ubuntu and it "shutting down"..
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I see it show up after I start the VM, and it goes away when I close the VM down. I could understand needing something like this if you suspended your VM, it has to store the memory dump somewhere, but with BootCamp you can't even suspend, so why need such a huge chunk of the host disk space?
 
Answer?????

Can we get an answer to this, please? Why such a huge waste of host disk space just to run a bootcamp installation? Or is it required for both virtual disks AND bootcamp disks?
 
I don't use boot camp and I just noticed I have this file also. It is 1.46GB in size. Can we trash this or is it needed for Parallels?
 
Same problem here -- I use bootcamp and the virtual memory for that is on that partition. The virtual memory for the Mac is on it's own VM, so I'm already double virtual memoried. Throw in this .mem file and we're using real disk space.

Seriously, I'd like to ditch .mem.
 
Games to play with .mem

I created a text file, saved it on my VM desktop, then opened the .mem file in Hex Fiend and searched for the text in the text file and found it. Maybe this means .mem caches disk activity to the boot camp partition?
 
Simple, but too difficult...

Such a simple question, but too difficult to answer? The overhead of 1.5GB drive space just to run a VM is absurd.

Andrew, Parallels, somebody, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?
 
what's going on is that nobody really answers posts here. he he.

also, don't forget this is a beta testing. the bug has been reported so now time to wait it out i suppose.
 
I have a 15 GB virtual drive for XP which results in a 768 MB mem-File - it is NOT BootCamp. As far as I know these mem-Files are necessary for the fast function of save the state of XP and the even fast resume.
 
drval said:
Send me the note and I'll send it on as well. Let's see what comes back.
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And your magic comes from.... ? Whatever, they need to provide support. I'm not a person whining about some trial package, I did buy the software and I shouldn't have to go through arcane hoops to get them to acknowledge a problem, and I think this is a pretty massive issue. I'm not the only one reporting it, and not just in this thread, but in the thread for the latest releast as well. Andrew has replied in part to messages that addressed it there, but then dodges dealing with this point. Whatever, hopefully VMWare will have a great offering, or Virtual Box gets some real community support for Mac OS X... Parallels was nice when it was the only game, but they have a LOT to learn about support.
 
mkummer said:
I have a 15 GB virtual drive for XP which results in a 768 MB mem-File - it is NOT BootCamp. As far as I know these mem-Files are necessary for the fast function of save the state of XP and the even fast resume.
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The problem is that when using bootcamp (and already giving up a ton of disk space for a fixed partition size, you can't even use save/restore/resume/etc, so there is no value for it.
 
n9yty said:
And your magic comes from.... ? Whatever, they need to provide support. I'm not a person whining about some trial package, I did buy the software and I shouldn't have to go through arcane hoops to get them to acknowledge a problem, and I think this is a pretty massive issue. I'm not the only one reporting it, and not just in this thread, but in the thread for the latest releast as well. Andrew has replied in part to messages that addressed it there, but then dodges dealing with this point. Whatever, hopefully VMWare will have a great offering, or Virtual Box gets some real community support for Mac OS X... Parallels was nice when it was the only game, but they have a LOT to learn about support.
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I'm simply making an offer. What you do -- or don't do -- in re: to that is up to you.
 
My issue with it is that it must affect performance. The beta before it appeared seems faster. I'm not saying get rid of it altogether, just make it an option that I can turn off.
 
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