I have Mountain Lion and PD8 with a windows 7 x64 guest. Periodically (once per day or so) both the guest and the host operating systems become unusable because the mac runs out of memory. I have a mid 2011 mac mini with 8G of ram and 2GHz i7 processor and the guest is set to use 2GB of RAM. When this issue happens, activity monitor shows about 5GB of memory "inactive" and the disk is thrashing due to massive swapping. As soon as I shut down the windows guest the 5GB of memory is swapped back in and shows up as "free" and everything goes back to normal. I've just installed the update that was published today (Build 8.0.181.101) so we will see if this issue has been addressed yet, but if not, has any one else been having this problem and is there a workaround until it gets fixed? Thanks!
update.... I just saw it happen, and the inactive memory shot up by about 5 gigs in a few seconds, as well as almost 9G of swap getting used. Shutting down the windows 7 guest (once the disk stopped thrashing enough to let me do it) took about 5 minutes and as soon as it shutdown, there was immediately 6G free and swap dropped down to 3G used. The purge command has no effect on the memory parallels has eaten up as inactive.
I opened a ticket with support. After demonstrating the memory problem of the guest consuming 6GB of ram and 17.5GB of swap in two minutes with a single application running in the guest (and idle) in PD8 the response I got was: "Regarding your issue, your Parallels Desktop 7 is consuming memory as expected even though the virtual machine is closed." and some other platitudes about cpu usage. Sigh.
I also have the same problem, and on a different "machine", my bios indicates : "memory not installed". When purging via terminal, memory is recovered in OS X ML, but my QCODE still indicates leak of memory. It happens when PD8 is on, but not at the beginning of the process.
I seem to have isolated this issue to java applications running on the windows 7 guest under java 6. The main application I am using is the Commvault Simpana console. Again, what happens is that the virtual machine starts using all of the ram of the mac (my VM has 2G allocated to it and I have 8G in the mac). The operating system goes from 5+GB free to 0 free and 15+ GB swapped out in about 2 minutes and keeps swapping. As soon as I shut down the guest all of that memory and swap are freed up. See ticket #1467423
I have same issue with top spec iMac I have a Mid 2011 3.4Ghz Intel Core i7 with 20GB Ram, Win 7 Home Premium and running Parallels 8 (Build 8.0.18483, Revision 860857; March 30, 2013) and have this same problem. Parallels is configured to use 2 CPUs, 14GB RAM and 512MB video memory, optimised for virtual machine, all fancy Windows effects turned off, etc etc. Within a very short time (10-20mins) of running Parallels and opening Windows, I get an error message saying there is not enough (RAM) memory, and if I look at the hard disk, it has mysteriously lost 5-6GB of space - which does not reappear until I shut down Parallels and restart. This makes it virtually impossible to use, and I have had resort to going back to using an old machine I have that runs Win XP and Parallels 7 - crazy!! I have been a parallels user since the early days, so am pretty confident I understand how to configure it best for what I do - but this issue is driving me insane. Please help Parallels!!!
