memory consumption

[lensv]

I have four different VMs running on a Mac Pro. Two of them have been given 2 GB RAM each and the other two have got 500 MB each. This means that they should consume about 5 GB of memory together. But on my machine VMware "eats" almost 10 GB RAM... Is this normal?

[admin]

I have four different VMs running on a Mac Pro. Two of them have been given 2 GB RAM each and the other two have got 500 MB each. This means that they should consume about 5 GB of memory together.

Correct, leaving out other overhead (for example, if all four have 3D acceleration enabled, that's another 512 MB for the virtual VRAM).

But on my machine VMware "eats" almost 10 GB RAM

What's your basis for this statement?

[lensv]

Activity Monitor shows those facts.

[admin]

Activity Monitor shows those facts.

Come on, details please. Where does Activity monitor show this? Are we talking about RSIZE, VSIZE, something else? What processes are consuming the memory, and what is the division between them? Screenshot?

[lensv]

Sorry, I thought it was the RSIZE that was growing, but it seems to be the VSIZE after all (and that might be natural(?). Anyway, it is the VMware Fusion and the wmware-vmx processes that consumes alot of memory. I can't give you any screenshots right now since I just rebooted the host and it takes a while for the memory to grow.

In Activity Monitor I have noticed that alot of memory is getting marked as inactive. I know this is an OSX question... but does anyone know if there is a way to set this free, without restarting the host?

[timothyhunter]

If OS X needs memory for something it will free the inactive memory as necessary.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20010613140025184

[lensv]

I'm not sure if this "buffer cashe" that is explained in that text is the same thing as inactive memory. But if so, it doesn't seem to work as it should... If I shut down Fusion and all the VMs that were running, only a small part of the free memory is "expanded". The part of the memory that is marked as inactive doesn't shrink at all. It holds the same size as before and since there is a quite small amount of free memory left it will soon be reconsumed by other processes and by that the system will start swapping again...

Enough for today... Merry X-mas everyone!