Appalling memory management?

Am I missing something, or is Parallels 7 for Mac deliberately programmed to have as inefficient memory management as possibe. Maybe some tie-in with crucial to sell more RAM?

I have 8GB RAM in my MacBook Pro. More than plenty for virtualisation. Parallels has been told it can have 2, which doesn't really mean anything as it takes what it wants.

Without parallels my memory usage tends to be around 3.5GB all in, unless photoshopping, or about 2.5GB with no programs open. So why am I now up to 7.2GB and climbing with no OSX programs open and just parallels running?

It was at 6 (far too high anyway), but I rebooted the VM and it only gave me 1GB of it back. Essentially each reboot will cost me 1GB RAM?

What is wrong with this program? Is there any fix for it or shall I just ask for a refund?

 

That's most likely the result of the way OSX manages RAM, there is a thing called inactive memory which is memory that was used by a program but isn't in use anymore, OSX will retain it if you have free memory, and this happens for a good reason, if the said program requires the files that are stored in inactive memory it will use them instead of reading again from the disk, speeding everything up. Basically the logic OSX follows is, if you have RAM why not use it, free memory space is just sitting there being wasted, use it for speeding up apps.

If you don't see any slowness happening due to paging you have nothing to complain about, your RAM is being used to its fullest improving the speed of everything, that's how it's supposed to work.

If you leave Safari (or any other browser) open for days, and constantly browse the internet, you'll see a similar behaviour.

Again, I say, most likely the result, can be another problem, but the said behaviour is characteristic of OSX.