HostMemoryLow with plenty of memory

[lefevrol]

Hi sasquatch, thanks but did you read the exchange above? We already covered that ground: if one goes by the numbers reported by Task Manager or Process Explorer I am well within the limits, with ample margin. The other poster claims these numbers are irrelevant.

[Sasquatch]

Are you sure that the numbers I mentioned are really within your said margin? I know vbox4me2 is pretty knowledgable, but I have my doubts on some things he posts. This is one of it.
As I noted, and if you do some maths, you will see that when I ran the 512 MB VM, my memory used didn't increase with only 512 MB, but almost 800 MB (from 700 MB to 1,5 GB). So you might have that 512 MB left, but not for the actual VB process that also takes some memory. It doesn't have to be this 300 MB difference, but it can be just the small bit that makes your system run out of RAM.

[bobulated]

Hi,
Getting similar symptoms here:
- Running Fedora-10 on XP-SP2
- 3.6GB RAM installed on host box (XP)
- Set Guest (Fedora) for 1.8GB RAM

getting "HostMemoryLow" error at the following point:
- Guest (Fedora) Memory usage: 900MB
- Host (XP) Memory usage: 2.3 GB

Host (XP) Memory usage presumably includes the Guest usage, since when I
shut down the Guest, then XP drops to about 1.5 GB or so (i.e. a substantial
drop)

Quandary:
Why the "HostMemoryLow" error? There is ample memory available according
to the OS resource tools. I could understand if the usage was borderline, but
I don't appear to be near the full usage. Even still, a more graceful approach
such as a warning might be more practical than just pausing the Guest - I can
only perform a hard reset at that point.

Thanks for any information.

- (Discom) Bob

[Vercix]

I too am having a similar problem. I'm running on XP sp3 and trying to boot ubuntu through VB. I AM SURE that I have allotted enough space towards virtualbox. I've set it up with 50GB (dynamic) and given it 1000MB of my 2GB of RAM. I receive the same error of:

ERROR ID: HostMemoryLow
Severity: Non-Fatal Error

This is absurd seeing as I was running this with less than 24 process, and less than 3% cpu usage throughout the entire download of ubuntu onto the drive. I had nothing else open and have more than enough RAM and space on my computer to run virutal box. I've successfully set up a VB when trying out Windows 7, and received no errors; however, I am now receiving this baffling call for more memory. I could potentially give it 75% of my RAM and run on my host machine without a hitch; yet, I'm fairly certain that I'd receive the same error.

[chip]

I got the same errors with Ubuntu 8.04.1 guests on XP SP3 (all 32-bit).
They're only occurring since the upgrade to 2.20.
These are guests with either 512MB or 1024MB allocated, and I can infer from Process Explorer, Taskman and perfmon that I am not running out of physical memory.
Will have time to troubleshoot it in a few days, but it seems to be a collision between the way Vbox 2.20 behaves and the way XP allocates resources.

[paulspignon]

I'm having the same kind of trouble, with the following setup:
host - XP64-bit SP2, Intel Core2 Duo T9950 at 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM, virtualization enhancements enabled in BIOS
VirtualBox 2.2.0, allocated 2 GB of RAM and 60 GB disk space
guest - Debian amd64, installing with so-called Small CD version on USB stick
Getting files from ftp.se.debian.org

During the stage designated "Select and install software", retrieving file n get a HostMemoryLow error. n has been between 13 and 438 in different attempts.
I tried stopping various apps (like Firefox, soffice, Skype,...) and services, to no avail.

Task Manager shows
VirtualBox.exe using 67 MB of RAM,
System 64 MB,
page fault usage 2.78 GB
Physical memory
total ~ 4GB
available ~1.2 GB
system cache ~1.4 GB

This must surely be a bug. Anyone know how to get round it?
Thanks in advance for any good advice.

Oh and by the way, VirtualBox 2.2 Interface keeps crashing, will report that elsewhere. Anyone else seen such behaviour?

/Paul

[SeanieB]

It's happening to me too:

Here's some background info:

64 bit XP Pro
6 GB of RAM,
the guest is Ubuntu x64

I have 5.4 GB of RAM free when I tried this according to Process explorer and PC wizard 08

I get this error when it's set to 2 GB on the splash screen and right on the desktop when set to 1 GB. I haven't had any other problems with RAM in the past...what's the story?

[paulspignon]

Well, one way out of the grief is to revert to VB 2.1.4. On doing this, everything else the same (see previous posting for params), I succeeded in installing Debian 64-bit on a VirtualBox machine.
Conclusion: 2.2.0 has bad bugs, don't use it till it gets fixed.
Btw, anyone know how one can get the source as a VC++ project - could try debugging under Windows if I had that.

/Paul

[vb101]

There is something wrong with VirtualBox now. I'm getting this HostMemoryLow error all the time when I try to run an old or setup a new VM.

With earlier versions I was able to run VB on my computer with 512 MiB RAM (yes it's low by contemporary standards, but it is its limit). Moreover, I'm running WMvare virtual machine on this computer right now. I have never had any problems with memory allocation running WMvare. In it's configuration VM has 224 MiB memory allocated, but when I run it WMvare never takes all that memory from host machine. So, the requirement to allocate all VM memory from RAM in host machine when it starts looks very suspicious to me... WMvare doesn't have this problem, then why VirtualBox does???

Here is some memory stats related to WMvare session mentioned above:

• Before I start WMVare:
  Physical memory Available: 198 MiB
  Commit Charge Total: 515 MiB

• When I run WMvare (WXP host, WXP guest):
  Physical memory Available: 20 MiB
  Commit Charge Total: 536 MiB

[chip]

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/3657
there is a ticket for this...

[hurryHu]

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/3657
there is a ticket for this...

Hopefully this will be fixed soon. VBox is useless at the moment... (8 Gig of Ram and only one VM is possible and that with max 1.6 GB RAM, puh...)

Could this depend on the latest M$-Patch-Day? Before this VBox 2.2.0 was running like a flaw (o.k., networking needs to be fixed).

Regards, Harald

[coolbiker]

I haven't gotten my vista updates for the week yet and Just updated at start of the week. I'm using 2.2 and have a bug up right now 3828 so I assume its a duplicate now. Either way If there's a resolvement of this I'd like to get the patch. I should have scratched my head when VB didn't notify me of the update through the program. it seems like with this bug I can only have 2 VB's open at a time and so far when trying internal host with pxe It wont run as I assume it should with wds on the end of one client.

[chip]

Hopefully this will be fixed soon. VBox is useless at the moment... (8 Gig of Ram and only one VM is possible and that with max 1.6 GB RAM, puh...)

I'd suggest rolling back to 2.1.4, and waiting for a minor point release. On 2.1.4 with 32bit XP host, I can assign ~3GB RAM to a VBox guest. According to the ticket linked, the fix is in the source tree now, so I hope it'll be incorporated in the next minor release.

It's quite impressive actually, two weeks ago the bug was submitted and initially considered minor, but within a fortnight the dev team have upgraded its status to major and there's a fix submitted.

I hope Oracle don't drop Vbox development, it's turning into a wonderful product.

[coolbiker]

I just wonder in that fact what the virtual boxes are going to do if I back install since I have the guest additions installed for 2.2. I always remember the fun I had with another program called Miro and if you backed up the database would not get the message.

btw I guess subscription mode does not work with these forums because you posted and I didn't get notice.

[coolbiker]

I 'm sure someone said it in here but I desided to try the words of peers and lower my VB's memory usage by a small bit (512MB to 300MB) . At least I can get my required work done till a compiled version of 2.2.1 is made available to the public.