Suddenly consuming all memory

[xgecko]

I recently noticed that my system became very sluggish.  After a bit of poking around I determined that all of my 64GB of RAM were consumed, mostly by VMWare Workstation.  I often do have several guests open at once, but never more than 32 GB allocated.

It now happens every day, I have to reboot to clear memory and then eventually I will run out and have to reboot again.

I cannot find any cause of this other than VMWare even though it does not really show this memory in the Task Manager.  If I do not run Workstation I never have an issue.

What happened, and what can I do about it?  Nothing changed in the settings of my VMs, but I did do an update to Workstation a month or so ago if I recall correctly.

Please advise.

[Technogeezer]

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@xgecko wrote:

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I cannot find any cause of this other than VMWare even though it does not really show this memory in the Task Manager.  

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Then what is telling you you are running out of memory if you can’t find this in Task Manager?

Can you share some details on your kit? Hardware, operating system, Workstation version (before and after upgrade)?

[xgecko]

For one thing, I recover much more memory if I close VM WS (after it consumes memory) than is accounted for by the memory allocation plus a margin.

Conversely, if I do not run VM WS then I never use more than about 20 GB or so - if that.  Right now I show 13.4GB consumed.  Running a VM that is allocated 16 GB brings that up to 30.4 GB.  Adding two more VMs, each allocated 4 GB brings it up to 34.1 then 37.3.

Eventually I will notice that things have gotten sluggish and I discover that 63.7 GB are used and closing VM WS takes it back down to about 30 GB.  I then have to reboot to clear the remaining memory.

If I do not run VM WS I never use more than about 20 GB.

That suggests to me that VM WS is leaking memory somehow.  I will now do my work, and eventually memory usage will climb until the system becomes sluggish.  I could just close WS and reopen it and it will consume about 24 GB from there, but it will run out of memory again much sooner.

I cannot find any other explanation, so there you have it.

I have an AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12 Core CPU, 64GB RAM and multiple SSDs with plenty of space.

WS version is 16.2.3 build-19376536 and I have no idea what the previous version was other than to say it was the previous version of WS 16.x.

Host and Guest OS is Win 10.  1 Guest is 64 bit, the other two are 32 bit OS installs.

[xgecko]

Not at all sure what to make of this, but I need to report it and close out the topic...

I upgraded to Windows 11 and the problem went away.  I can leave VM WS open for days and I do not see the consumption of memory like I was seeing.

Since I never was able to test without VM running due to my work, it is not clear exactly what was going on other than that my colleague has the same problem now with his VM system on Win 10. 

He does not report memory consumption unless VM WS is running, but he also has much less memory so we are not clear what is going on.