I am using a 1 gig MBP at 1.83 ghz and is experiencing slow performance in the VM with 512 meg allocated to it. It is worth while to upgrade my mem to 1.5gig? Pls share you comments if your system flies with 1.5gig of ram and above.
Of course it worths it, I currently have 1.5GB on my 2GHz iMac and I couldn't really tell that I'm getting slow performance, eventually a 1 second lag when the first time I use exposé, but Paralles is VERY responsive as long as I'm not running a rosetta driven app, if so, it becomes a little slower (mac OS, not the guest OS) but it isn't unbearable and becomes smoother with time. Even if you upgrade your RAM I might suggest that stay in the 512-768 MB allocation setting, you'll notice the speed bump on both Mac OS X, and the guest OS.
You bet! You bet it's worth it!!! I ran Parallels Beta 1 on my 20" iMac with 1 Gb of Ram and it worked great. The issue that I have is that when using Parallels, I'm not 100% in the VM. I bounce back and forth from Firefox, xCode, and back to the VM when needed. So I took the plunge and upgraded the iMac to 2 Gb and have upgraded to Beta 3 of Parallels. It's nice to know that I can crank up the VM to 750 Mb (haven't tried to go any higher yet) and still have a *VERY* responsive system (both VM and OSX) - Hell, it's faster than my 3.2 Ghz P4 chip running XP. RAM can only hurt your pocket book and you everything else to gain from the upgrade. -David
I have MacBook Pro 1.8ghz with 1.5gig RAM. I have allocated default 256meg for Windows XP SP2. Windows running exceptionally well with "best appearance" setting. Love this thing!!! I even installed custom desktop picture (which normally slows down PC with slow video cards), custom vista-like theme, sound enabled. Running 3-4 apps at once and still works great.
your mac wont ever have to mutch ram ! myself 1,5 g imac 1,8 Window xp 400ram on VM i test the speed converting avi .... 65 fps , with de same soft my PC 2 ghz 512ram converte at 45fps
You might be better off making that vm 256. If I am not mistaken Paralles will grab what it needs so windows will think it is using virtual memory but in reality parallels will have that stuff cached in ram.
I'm using a 2GHz MacBook Pro with 2Gb RAM. When I run one VM, I give it 1Gb, and leave the other half for OS X. Performance on both the host and the VM is excellent. RAM is so cheap, well relative to the cost of the MacBook Pro anyway, that I couldn't see any reason not to stick the maximum in it.
I have an MBP with 2 gigs of RAM. I used 512m for Windows. My "slider" in the Preferences is set at 1gig total use for Parallels. I'm very pleased with the performance. I doubt I'd try this with only 1gb.
Just upgraded tp 2Gb I upped the memory in my MacBook from 1Gb to 2Gb. The difference for me has been very noticeable.
2GB mac mini I started with 1GB but when running a couple of big OS X apps (Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator) + Parallels I was experiencing some noticeable slowdowns. 2GB seems to have fixed this problem really nicely
Very fast on my Gig Ram MBP I am running XP in a basically default config (384k ram) and it runs very fast. No hesitation, no networking issues. I use instances of this vm (with various VPNs) to access customer networks thru both en1 and en0.
I'm running the latest version of Parallels on my MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAMmage - it's working great for me. In the time since it's been available I've maybe had the program crash my computer completely (acted like I had force restarted my Mac) - in every instance neither the Mac nor Parallels seemed to have suffered any ill effects for it happening. I'm using Parallels everyday, most of the day, at my work, to access the handful of applications I need to use Windows for (and a couple of my own pieces of software that don't have Mac versions - like Army Builder and Games Workshop's Interactive Army list programs - for REAL games I use Boot Camp and boot into native Windows - for everything else I use my Mac the way it was intended - OS X.) I'm looking forward to more features being built into Parallels and it's final release form - but in the meantime, I'm happily using it almost every day with great results!
iMac with 2GB RAM I have an iMac with the following specs: Core Duo 17", 1.83GHz processors, 2GB RAM, 250GB disk, Mac OS X (10.4.6) I'm running PW 2.1 Beta 3 with a Windows XP VM (fully up to date) and a Tao Linux VM. I've allocated 512MB virtualized RAM to the WinXP VM and 256MB virtualized RAM to the Tao VM (I may crank the WinXP RAM down a bit later). So far all are performing well -- i.e. they are fast enough for me (I've no formal benchmarks to provide, alas). In my reasonable amount of experience with VMware (Workstation and ESX server) I can say the following: 1. You can never have too much RAM on the host machine (that's why I bought the iMac with maxed out RAM) 2. Insufficient RAM can kill virtualization performance (you can paging/swapping, can't you?) 3. Allocate as much RAM to each VM as it needs and no more (this may take some experience to figure out -- depends upon what the VM is doing) Remember, you are optimizing for overall throughput on the entire box. In my case, I want Mac OS X to run well and the VMs to run reasonably well. I don't expect native speed on the VMs and I also don't expect them to run like molasses. Keeping an eye on performance numbers (Activity Monitor is a good place to start) on the host machine is a good idea. On my iMac, for example, Activity Monitor currently shows the following memory usage: 935MB --> wired 450MB --> active 600+MB --> inactive As long as the page outs don't rise steadily and quickly, I'm happy. I'm sure when I add a few more VMs (I plan on running at least two more copies of Tao), this may change -- and it may also cause me to re-think how much RAM I've allocated to each of the VMs. Have fun!
