Windows – Massive Memory Leaks

macosmemory leaksvmware-fusionwindows 7

I seem to have huge memory leaks, which are confusing me.

I'm running fusion 3.1 / Windows 7 on Snow Leopard. It's a clean install with all upgrades applied. I've given fusion 8GB on a 14GB machine.

I've installed VS2008 & Eclipse in Windows 7. Nothing unusual.

Inside Task Manager in Windows 7, my memory footprint stays reasonable, at <2GB. But in OSX, Activity Monitor shows the footprint of vmware-vmx to be much larger. It starts at 2 GB, which seems fine, but whenever I'm actually doing anything in Windows, vmware-vmx's footprint grows at a few MB per second. After 20 mins or so it's using ~10GB and everything grinds to a halt. Throughout this, Task Manager still says I'm only using 2GB. And whatever I do in windows seems to increase vmware-vmx's memory footprint. Even closing down an application seems to make it go up.

So is this par for the course in fusion? I was previously using parallels 3 / Vista under Leopard, and it worked fine. I'd assumed my new fusion config would work better, but this makes it completely unusable. (And apparently I can't even ask tech support unless I buy a support package…)

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks

Best Answer

I'm not sure about OSX, but in Windows I use Process Monitor to monitor the memory usage of suspect applications. I had one that kept claiming memory and not releasing it, which made the memory graph look like a continuous stairway. It won't tell you why the memory is leaking, but it will tell you what app is leaking it. Process Monitor is much more informative than Task Manager.

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Windows 7 64-bit showing 12GB (7.99GB usable)

I feel like an idiot.

I decided to remove it and attach it again, making sure that it's pushed in well. And it's ok now.

Not sure why it was recognised but unusable though, rather strange.

Windows – VMware Fusion performance degrading after few hours

I have same problem, but these solutions was not fixed my issues. However I have found a blog post from artykul8, what fixed fixed all of my issues!

http://artykul8.com/2012/06/vmware-performance-enhancing/

Tweak: Disable memory swap files .vmem files

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

Unfortunately this parameter does not work for VMware Player, as it always creates virtual machine’s full memory swap file. For VMware Fusion on Mac and Linux instead of mainMem.useNamedFile you have to set mainMem.backing flag.

mainMem.backing = "swap"

Tweak: Choose the right disk controller and specify SSD

Instead of the latest SATA AHCI controller choose LSI Logic SAS controller with SCSI disk for Windows guest OS, or PVSCSI for other types of OS. Unfortunately SATA AHCI on VMware has the lowest performance out of the three controllers and highest CPU overhead (see the references on the topic at the end). In addition to choosing the right controller, if your host disk is SSD you can explicitly specify the disk type as SSD to guest OS.

scsi0:0.virtualSSD = 1

Tweak: Disable log files for VM

logging = "FALSE"

Alternatively you can specify a different location to store the log file, if you ever need them:

log.filename = "c:\Windows\Temp\vm1.log"

Tweak: Other Disk & Memory I/O Performance Optimization

Disable memory trimming:

MemTrimRate = "0"

Disable page sharing:

sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

Disable scale down of memory allocation:

MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"

Tweak: Disabling Snapshots

Disable snapshots if you are not using them and prefer full backups:

snapshot.disabled = "TRUE"

Tweak: Disable Unity Mode

Unity might be a great feature for running virtual desktops operating systems, but it is not the most useful for virtualizing server OS. An annoying sign of enabled unity is GuestAppsCache or caches folder with a large number of files and subfolders. In order to disable it for your VM add the following lines:

isolation.tools.unity.disable = "TRUE"
unity.allowCompositingInGuest = "FALSE"
unity.enableLaunchMenu = "FALSE"
unity.showBadges = "FALSE"
unity.showBorders = "FALSE"
unity.wasCapable = "FALSE"

Best Answer

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Windows 7 64-bit showing 12GB (7.99GB usable)

Windows – VMware Fusion performance degrading after few hours

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