Unattended VM balloons to 3Gb

[stever777]

I am running VMWare Fusion 4.1.1 with a Windows 2000 guest operating system under OS X Lion 10.7.3 on an iMac with 4Gb of physical memory. I have the virtual machine set to have 512Mb of memory. The only thing running on the W2K is a 10-year-old copy of Eudora, which downloads my email via POP3 into my email archives. We're talking a couple of hundred messages a day, at most.

When I keep the VM running in the background during normal work days, everything is fine.

But every time I go away for more than a day and leave the VM open (with nothing else running), I come back to find Activity Monitor reporting VMWare has ballooned to [currently] 2.96Gb of virtual memory, and 2+ Gb of physical memory. Selecting the VMWare window, I can see that Eudora is continuing to run and the Windowns tray app is showing packets being pulled down from the network. But clicking on the window or trying to do anything in that window gives a spinning beachball and continual disk access. For hours. Literally, hours, during which the host machine is completely unusuable. The one time I tried to force a shutdown, I ended up corrupting my disk, so now my machine is out of commission for hours after my return.

I'm assuming that what's causing the beachball + disk access is excessive host disk swapping of the 3Gb-of-virtual-memory VMWare machine that I configured never to go above 500Mb.

I've used this same virtual machine for the five years, since switching from Windows to the Mac. I update the VMWare Tools, but other than Firefox, Eudora, and a very old copy of ZoneAlarm, I have nothing else installed on this VM. It used to work flawlessly, but about a year ago this horrible memory-hog behavior began. (I don't recall whether it happened in the transition between Fusion 3 and 4, or whether it began with a later update of 3.)

I've tried upgrading the virtual machine, downgrading to an older copy, updating VMWare tools to the latest version, using an older version, etc. Nothing seems to change the behavior. After being a happy VMWare user since the 1990s, I am now planning to switch to Parallels because this is simply killing my system and my productivity.

Any clues why the memory usage balloons like this, and how to stop it? This has already cost me 2 hours of inability to work tonight.

I've attached a screen shot of Activity Monitor taken about 10 minutes after I clicked on the VMWare window and got the spinning beachball. The memory usage had shrunk from its previous 2.96Gb high to "only" 1.88Gb of physical memory. During the time I spent typing this (on my other machine), the memory usage went back up to 1.96Gb of physical memory. VMWare no longer shows as not responding, and the beachball is gone, but clicking on icons and in the VMWare window currently is having no effect (though the Zonealarm network monitor in the guest OS is still showing network activitiy, so presumably Eudora's running along quite nicely).