Wired memory

Parallels Team,

Is there any way to reduce the wired memory that Parallels 5 is using? On my 2 Gig machine (MacBook Air late 2008, Nvidia 9400 graphics) with a 1 Gig VM, about 1.75 Gig are wired (=reserved). This leaves hardly any room for other applications - in particular when taking into account that Parallels 5 (the app) also needs a bit of memory to run.

Is there a start parameter I could use (I believe these are called "boot flags"; I'm running Parallels 5 German, where this is called "Boot-Kennzeichen")? Setting the VM to run optimised for Mac OS X apps (Options -> Optimise -> Optimise performance for...) doesn't change the wired memory requirements. In Parallels 4, this setting would really reduce the VM's memory requirements - not so in Parallels 5.

I really like Parallels 5 and am trying hard to run it every day. However, at the moment, running the VM together with Mac apps (which is the whole point) is really impossible.

Thanks!

 

Follow up

I couldn't find anything on "Parallels boot flag memory" on the web (Google wasn't my friend here, and Bing was even less useful), so I tried setting this boot flag:

"DiskCachePolicy=0"

While this does not significantly reduce the amount of wired memory shown in Activity Monitor, switching back and forth between the Mac and the VM now is significantly smoother... I have no idea what's happening (or whether DiskCachePolicy" is actually a valid boot flag).

Weird. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Parallels memory

This can be adjusted by reducing the memory for your Parallels VM. I ran into poor performance on both sides when I maxed the VM memory to 1200. Since I have a SSD I set the paging file to 5000/5000 and reduced the memory down to 512. This puts me at 1gb wired and the paging file performs well on the SSD. I am using Win 7 as my VM.

 

I'm now at 768 MB for my Win7 VM. Still, I think that half a Gig of overhead for the VM is pretty hefty. Parallels team, isn't there any way to reduce this?

 

Thought I might add to the discussion.

Running:
MacBook Pro 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8GB RAM
Mac OS X 10.6.5 Snow Leopard
Parallels 6 Build 6.0.11828
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional

With just Parallels, Windows and Activity Monitor running the "Wired" memory eventually rises up to and settles on 3.83GB. That does leave a healthy amount of RAM free but it is soon filled with other stuff.

Parallels Support Team sent a helpful email to me:

1. Start Parallels Desktop but do not start the Virtual Machine (Windows 7).
Click the Virtual Machine in the Mac menu bar and navigate to Configure.
In the General tab assign the number of CPU's to 1 and drag the memory slider to around 1300-1500 MB as maximum.

2. In the same Configuration window-> Options tab -> Optimization.
Un-check: Enable adaptive Hyper-visor. (disable it)
Check-mark: Tune Windows for speed. (enable it)

3. Click on Hardware tab in the configuration-> Video-> Drag the slider to 128-256 mb.

4 Log in to windows => Click on Start menu => Go to Run => Type %temp% => Press Enter key => Delete all the files that are in this temp folder.

Note: Some files cannot be deleted even if you delete it manually and individually. So kindly ignore them.

5. Log in to windows => Click on Start menu => Go to Run => Type recent => Press Enter key => Delete all the files that are in this temp folder.

Please also ensure that you are not using a muti-threaded anti-viruses, like Norton, Zone-Alarm, etc. This will directly affect the perforfance of the Virtual Machine.

I'll send an update soon.