I don't doubt that you (and apparently many others) are having speed issues, but having a huge amount of virtual memory actually won't normally impact performance AT ALL. Virtual Memory often will never be accessed - so don't worry about it.noed said:But the worst thing is, that Parallels dashes the OS X performance to pieces. WindowServer is (when Parallels is running) constantly using aournd 100 MB of physical and 3.3 GB (!!!) of virtual memory.
kernel_task is currently using nearly 2GB on my macbook. It doesn't really mean anything, since most of that memory is probably stuff that hasn't been accessed in days or weeks, and will not be taking up RAM.