Using less memory a good idea?

[vamp07]

I have a suspicion that I'm hoping somebody can confirm. In Parallels if you have lots of memory (2gig) you are better off assigning your virtual machine less memory (384 or 256) because the lack of cache memory in the virtual machine will be made up for with the MAC virtual memory? Also suspending the machine will me faster because less memory needs to be written to disk. Any truth to this?


Thanks

 

[VTMac]

There is no one size fits all. The rule of thumb is to use the MINIMUM amount of VM memory to get good performance. The more memory you give to the VM the less available for OSX itself. For my particular windows workload, allocating 256M on the XP VM has both my VM and OSX running very, very fast. On the rare occasion I use VS.Net, I bump my VM to 512.

 

[rhind]

There is no one size fits all. The rule of thumb is to use the MINIMUM amount of VM memory to get good performance. The more memory you give to the VM the less available for OSX itself. For my particular windows workload, allocating 256M on the XP VM has both my VM and OSX running very, very fast. On the rare occasion I use VS.Net, I bump my VM to 512.

I agree. I build quite large projects in both VS2005 and Borland C++Builder 6. I have cache set to OS X, 768MB allocated to the VM on a 2GB MacBook Pro C2D. This keeps OS X very responsive and also gives enough memory for the development I do on Windows without much swapping from either OS.

Cheers

Russell