Extremely high number on RAM usage for guest macOS VM

S

slickw

Bit poster
App version: 20.1.0
Computer: MacBook M1 Pro A2442 - 32GB RAM
Guest VM OS: Sequoia 15.0.1
Host OS: Sequoia 15.0.0
RAM assigned to Guest VM:
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Anybody know why I am seeing such high numbers in the activity monitor for the MacOS guest vm. I see 2 processes for the same. One is 8.24 GB which is around how much I assigned to this VM and one with an Apple Icon that just keeps on growing. At one point I saw the number to be 229.5 GB usage. Is that a bug?

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I see this problem too. A newly created macOS VM (never logged into after creation), left at the login prompt asks for nearly half of a gigabyte per minute, or 28 Gigs per hour. It is twice as bad if you start up a second macOS VM. Eventually the host macOS starts compressing memory and swapping out to disk and things get very slow.

Some screenshots of memory usage of new macOS VMs never logged in, waiting at login prompt. Notice the increasing memory consumption of the macOS VM.

I tried the same thing with new macOS VMs via UTM and there was no memory leak, however the Nighthawk router started blocking phishing attempts to those new UTM VMs. There is no phishing issue with new Parallels VMs, so I'd prefer to keep using Parallels, and for now I will restart my VMs frequently to keep them performant.

M2 Max MBPro 64GB RAM, Parallels v20.1.0 (55732) running on macOS 15.0.1, new VMs created as macOS 15.0.1
 

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One more objservation. The macOS VM must be shut down, not restarted, in order to release all of the memory it requested while it was running.
 
I have same issue running a macOS VM on my M1 Macbook Pro, the requesting ram goes quick from starting a VM, normaly I can run in for a couple of hours until ram goes up to around 90-100 Gb and than the VM will crash. As mention above, to release the memory its not enough to hibernate the VM it must be shutdown och restarted.
 
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