Memory Leak?

S

scot629

Bit poster
Not sure this is a memory leak or not, but when I run 3186 on a MacBook Pro with 3Gb of physical memory, Activity Monitor reports more than 500Mb of free memory when Parallels first launches (WinXP SP2). As the day wears on free memory drops down into the 50-100 Mb range, and VM size grows and grows and grows. After about ten hours of running Activity Monitor reports Parallels consuming 23% of the CPU, 453.07 MB of real memory, and a whopping 2.26Gb of VM. If I leave Parallels running overnight it will either crash or the machine becomes almost unresponsive until I quit Parallels. Sometimes I need to restart the computer to put things back to normal. I sent a bug report about this behavior while running the most recent beta, and guess I'll need to do the same with this newest final version.

If I don't run Parallels I see over .5Gb of free memory and only tens of Mb of VM reported in Activity Monitor, no matter how long the machine runs.

Just curious if others are seeing this problem, or if there's a work around?

TIA,

Scot
 
I use the same set up

and it is stable with 2 gb physical memory

how much memory have you allocted Parallels

6 gb had disk is enough for me 500 k ram


too much makes my machine run slower

Hugh W
 
Can't tell you if you're seeing a leak or not, but I can tell you that you aren't reading the data in activity monitor correctly. Activity monitor reports the following:

- Wired - this is memory in use by applications that can not be swapped to disk. When Wired = total physical ram, you're toast.
- Active - this is memory in use by applications that CAN be swapped to disk.
- Inactive - this is memory in no longer claimed by applications, but as a performance optimization, OSX has decided to not swap to disk since that application may later request the same data. (Or you may run the same app again if you've recently quit it.)
Free- this is memory not being used at all.

In OSX, generally speaking Free has very little to no meaning, as the OS attempt to keep as much in RAM as possible, even if you exit and app.

In short, focus on Inactive.
 
scot629 said:
If I don't run Parallels I see over .5Gb of free memory and only tens of Mb of VM reported in Activity Monitor, no matter how long the machine runs.

Just curious if others are seeing this problem, or if there's a work around?
Click to expand...

Create a new XP vm with nothing else installed. Save it to CD or DVD or elsewhere on your hd. Then start it up and let it run over night. If it is Windows that has the mem leak then a new clean instance should not suck it all up. If this still sucks memory then it could be Parallels at fault.

I suggest keeping a clean XP install around to use for baseline testing like this, and for quick recovery in emergencies.
 
VTMac said:
In short, focus on Inactive.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification. Wired and Active memory allocations seem to stay pretty stable, but Free space gradually migrates to Inactive as the hours go by. If I understand your explaination, when the OS needs more memory, and there is insufficient Free space, it will then reclaim Inactive space. So as long as I'm not running out of both Free and Inactive memory, things should continue to run smoothly, right?

Scot
 
I too think there may be a memory leak with this version. I typically only run a handful of apps, but after a day of usage I have almost no free memory and while others say I shouldn't care about free ram.

I can say Parallels does. I've closed parallels done some other work, closed the other app and attempted to open parallels again only to be prompted by parallels telling me there's not enough free ram to start up. I have 4 gig of ram, 1.5gig has been alloted to parallels.

As the day wears on it seems the real memory indicator for the activity monitor show's parallels grabbing more and more ram. It started out with using only a 100meg of real ram (virtual is at 2.3gig) but I can see it slowly chewing it up. I've let sit there now for about 1/2 and the real ram is at 200 meg. and my free ram iis at 767meg.

Heck on machine with 4 gig and only running parallels, safari and mail, I should have more free ram.
 
There may be a leak, but you are not understanding the info you are seeing in activity monitor at all. Free RAM means essentially nothing in OSX. If you don't believe me, here it is straigth from Apple:


http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

"This means you shouldn't worry when the Free memory is low. "

If you really want to deduce what is going on with Parallels and whether it is leaking memory, you should start by reading and understanding that doc.
 
So, even though I might give my barebones XP install only 256 megs of ram, as a program, Parallels could use much more? I'm looking at the Activity Monitor and Parallels is currently using 311mb in Real Memory and 2 gigs in Swap. Does this sound right?
 
Dunno if anyone's read this, an apparent memory leak within "Activity Monitor" itself.

I've since quit running it (using "MenuMeters" instead). Although, now that I've visited that link again, he says at the top "10.4.9 seems to fix the bug mentioned here"...so I guess it's fixed now?

I think my Parallels seems to handle RAM ok, AFAIK, but my roomate's iMac definitely doesn't have as much RAM free after he quits Parallels, like a good chunk (500MB or so) is not being "let go" by Parallels.

Just wanted to add my two cents, not very scientific, I realize. :)
 
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