virtualbox.org

Just a dumb question I guess. I noticed on the tutorials that it states that one should not use
more than one gig of RAM for the virtual machine. Can someone tell me why that is? I was giving
Win 8 and Win 2008 sErver 1½ - 4 gigs of RAM and I did'nt see any performance benefit..Or am I doing something
wrong?

Thanks

Depends on the Host OS (32/64 Bit), the RAM size, free RAM.

You can give as much as RAM to the guest as you have free RAM. But not too much, the Host needs RAM for the OS and VBOX itsself. In your case (4 GB RAM) i think 2 GB for a guest is the maximum.

Benefits of more RAM you will only see if you start applications using/needing the RAM.

I agree with Stefan. There is no point in giving a guest OS 4G unless it can make use of it. The memory you allocate to a guest is no longer available to the host, and your guest performance will suffer if the host is starved on RAM.

Also if you allocate more memory to a guest than you have available at the time, it will not start.

Thanks for replies..Most helpful