virtualbox.org

MBP 13" 2.26ghz 8gb RAM, OS 10.6.2, giving Windows 7 VM anywhere from 2-3 gb RAM, I notice in Activity Monitor that the "Free" RAM decreases, the "Used" RAM increases, all while the VM is running. After shutting down the VM and closing all applications, the "Used" memory amount will still be taken. I've left it running for an hour and the "Free" ram gets down to 10-15 mb, used is over 7gb. Lowering the amount of RAM that the VM has only makes the problem come later rather than sooner. Is this considered a "memory leak" or have I gotten something misconfigured possibly?

Yeah I have observed something similar. Windows Server 2008 host running another Windows Server 2008 guest. The usual host memory usage is around 3-4GB, available memory is 8GB. I have dedicated 3GB to VM in headless mode but it ends up eating up all of the available memory (~7.9GB), even though it should stay at 6-7 max. Also it is difficult to see the actual usage because the VboxHeadless.exe always shows around 35 MB memory usage, so not very helpful.

Thanks for the reply. I've seen no improvement to this issue, it DOES noticably affect system performance. After closing VirtualBox completely, with the "used" RAM still all gobbled up, the remaining memory amount is low enough to cause the whole computer to stall while trying to operate it. Rebooting releases all the RAM obviously, but until then, it's bad.