On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 07:32, Gordan Bobic<gor...@bobich.net> wrote: > On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:37:25 +0200, Klaus Espenlaub > <klaus.espenl...@sun.com> wrote: > >> As you didn't say a thing about your host OS it's impossible to say >> anything intelligent about host memory usage characteristics. > > Both guests were Windows XP. > >> The information so far was absolutely correct, as Windows guests touch >> the entire RAM they detect pretty early during startup. So they need all >> RAM almost instantly. Other guest OSes are less greedy, and touch memory >> only as they make use if it. > > Sure, but my point is that 4GB of memory just went missing somewhere. Each > VM had 2GB allocated, and the host has 4GB of RAM. Yet somehow 2x2GB (two > guests) ended up using up 4GB of RAM + 4GB of swap and caused the machine > to grind to a halt. >
Obviously, the two VMs didn't use 4GB of RAM + 4GB of swap, since you have your host running. So, some of this memory is used by the host. Also, notice that, as all virtualization software there is an overhead. So, if the guest is set to 2Gb it might endup using 2,2Gb or even 2,5Gb (FWIK, the more memory you set the greater the overhead is). Also, as someone else pointed out: what host are you running? What is the mem usage of the host before launching any VM? _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list vbox-users@virtualbox.org http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
