Massive memory leak in 3106

B

Bluecoat93

Bit poster
Massive memory leak in 3106 (edit: and 3120)

(back up to the top you go... 3120/RC1 shows the exact same behavior)

Beta 3 appears to leak memory like a sieve on my Mac Pro.

At startup, without powering up a VM, Parallels takes a very respectable 40mb of real memory. However, the usage immediately starts ticking upward. After about 15 mins, again without a VM running, it's up to 200mb+.

Spinning up my XP Bootcamp VM (384mb memory size) raises the real memory usage, which is obviously expected. However, the usage continues to tick upward without bound. After leaving XP running overnight (doing nothing but running Outlook 2k3), Real Memory was over 1gb!

Ouch! Beta 3 finally fixes my Blackberry issues and brings me back from the Fusion public beta, but having to restart the application several times a day to reclaim memory is painful! I definitely did not see the same behavior in beta 1.
 
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These are the first round of betas I haven't installed as the changes were very large.

A memory leak when I just have 2Gb RAM will definately make me wait for the official release.
 
I have also observed this problem. I suspect this constant memory leak is why 3106 has crashed several times for me after a few hours of continuous operation. The new features for Windows in 3106 seem to have resulted in some performance and resource issues, such as the high (30%+) CPU consumption even when VMs are basically idle, the creation of very large .mem files, and this memory leak. I'm hoping the next official stable release will run much more efficiently than the Beta versions.
 
It doesn't seem to be a universal problem. On my MBP I see Parallels is using 83 meg of RAM and 2g of vram. That is with a running XP session with IE active with Webmail and an active X client. It's using 51% of the cpu. That's actually not bad. Firefox is using 500 meg of ram and 2g of virt ram, but only 5% of the cpu when idle. XP has been running non-stop for about two weeks. This is with build 3106. I can't explain it other than there may be some debug code running in the beta that is environment sensitive.
 
Build 3106 works on my iMac 17" 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo. Dunno what your problem with running it is.
 
I'm definitely seeing different behavior betweek 3106 and 3094 in that 3016 is continually growing at a fairly consistent clip, where 3094 isn't. I've gone back to 3094 as a result and will stay with it until a new build that addresses the problem is released.
 
Yes, same here, and i have posted other threads and started my own.

I can only hope that the parallels team knows about it. I just wish they would say something on this, just to know that it is known to them and they are working on it.
 
Yes 3120 it is just as stable (so far) as 3106 on my MBP C2D with 2 GB RAM 1024MB allocated, no Boot Camp.

I'll let you know tomorrow about my MBP CD (NOT C2D) with 2 GB RAM 10254 MB allocated AND Boot Camp.

Perhaps this concerns difference between MBP, Mac Pros and Mac Minis?
 
drval said:
Perhaps this concerns difference between MBP, Mac Pros and Mac Minis?
Click to expand...

A good question. I'm definitely seeing this behavior 100% of the time on my Mac Pro 2.66 (3gb RAM, 10.4.8). I shall copy over my VM's and test 3120 on a Mac Mini and MBP at work later this week.
 
Let's bump this to the top again in hopes the Parallel's team will answer if they are aware of the problem.

Steve
 
Steve, all -

We are aware. And looks like we now know what causes this - thanks to everyone sending us their observations, the most productive of which was "Memory is leaking even in Pause mode".

So, here's what you need to do to get rid of the leak:
1. Open Parallels Desktop menu.
2. Go to Preferences submenu.
3. Select Appearance tab.
4. Set the "Show live screen shot in Dock" option.

With this option set you will most probably stop the leak. Having live screenshot in dock should be a small inconvenience compared to it :)

We're fixing the problem in the next public release.

Best regards,
Tim
 
Leak continues despite suggestion

Glad the team is on the problem.

However the suggested workaround isn't working for me (MacPro 3 GZ, 6 MB RAM, 908 MB allocated to Parallels per recommendation). The leak continues, whether "Show live screen shot in Dock" is switched on or off. In fact, it appears to rise more quickly with this feature switched on.

I have found that suspending the VM drops usage dramatically; but upon resume, it begins to creep up again.
 
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betatester said:
Glad the team is on the problem.

However the suggested workaround isn't working for me (MacPro 3 GZ, 6 MB RAM, 908 MB allocated to Parallels per recommendation). The leak continues, whether "Show live screen shot in Dock" is switched on or off. In fact, it appears to rise more quickly with this feature switched on.

I have found that suspending the VM drops usage dramatically; but upon resume, it begins to creep up again.
Click to expand...

Damn.

Looks like there's another memory leak somewhere there.

I would appreciate an extended report about the problem like posted here http://forum.parallels.com/post38087-28.html

Please copy this stuff to [email protected] mailbox as well.

Best regards,
Tims
 
This leak still exists in 3120 and eventually produces a crash. I tried to study memory usage with the activity monitor carefully, and I believe the crash occured right when the 4 gigabyte mark was passed for total memory usage (including the virtual memory). This makes sense because 4 gigs is the limit of 32-bit addressing capability. Parallels crashed with malloc errors shown in console which seems consistent with this.
 
Tim Surgent said:
We are aware. And looks like we now know what causes this - thanks to everyone sending us their observations, the most productive of which was "Memory is leaking even in Pause mode".
Click to expand...
:) :) that was mine :) :)

Switching on "Show live screen shot in Dock" actually drastically reduces the memory drain from 50k/sec down to around 60 Bytes per second (at least in my case, MBP 17" CD, 2GB). I wouldn't have noticed that any more - with 35MB per week it needed probably months of uptime for it to hurt. I don't reboot often, but still around once a week...

This time it seems only happening when the VM is not paused, so it could also be something INSIDE my XP installation. As it is so minor now it's hard to really reliably observe.
 
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