Physical Memory Allocation on Host

[bigman]

I have a windows xp sp2 virtual machine with 512MB memory assigned to it.

I noticed that after booting the virtual machine all this memory gets allocated

by the vmware-vmx process (as physical memory as one can see with Activity-Monitor)

in steps after a short time running although not needed at all by the virtual machine

(the TaskManager on XP shows 90MB used on a fresh installation,

no further applications running).

Can I configure Fusion to allocate the memory on the host system only when needed

by the guest and have it growing to the specified limit?

I compared it to Paralles and there only a fraction of the assigned memory is allocated on

the host and it grows as needed.

[KevinG]

I noticed that after booting the virtual machine all this memory gets allocated

by the vmware-vmx process

This is because at first bootup of the VM all the memory pages have been walked/touched/zeroed out. Using task manager is not a accurate measurement of guest memory since most guest memory is mapped in the kernel address space and not the user address space of the vmware-vmx process.

[kalex]

hehe you have found the infamous windows memory hog

its in windows nature that after it starts up it allocates all of its memory, then it releases it and goes back to normal. i see this every time i reboot our guest windows servers and workstations in VI3, and i start seeing red alarms in Virtual Center. after about 5 minutes alarms disapear and everything is back to normal.