Windows shows incorrect information about the VM

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Windows hosts.
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jazcyk
Posts: 85
Joined: 8. Jun 2008, 11:30

Windows shows incorrect information about the VM

Post by jazcyk »

Windows Task manager shows incorrect information about the VM memory use.

I have a VM with SuSE 12.3 running in a Win7 host with a lot of servers (MySQl, Apache, LDAP etc. etc.) running . Windows task manager always shows memory use of 200-300 MBfor the VM process. This isd definitely incorrect as I have the MySQL variable innodb_buffer_pool_size set to 1G.

Anoteh observaton: my system has 32G phýsical RAM. But when the VirutalBox VM running wiht high load I experience from time to tome that when Windows Task Manager registers a memory use of around 20G, Windows will complain that is rnning out of memory and some program should be closed. This can only mean that there are¨10G memory sed by the VM but not accounted for in Window Task Manager. Virtualbox/the VM process seems not to communicate correctly about the memory used by the VM process.

Virtualbox 4.3.18 and 4.3.20.
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39134
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: VirtualBox+Oracle ExtPack
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: Windows shows incorrect information about the VM

Post by mpack »

It's a common observation, and the answer is always the same: what you're seeing is the effect of caching by the host.
jazcyk
Posts: 85
Joined: 8. Jun 2008, 11:30

Re: Windows shows incorrect information about the VM

Post by jazcyk »

It is not cached in My case. I have turned off Virtual Memory in Windows (because I have so much physical memory that I don't need virtual memory).

When the Linux guest is working hard it uses @10 GB that Windos does not see. Various monitors in Linux (Gnome System Monitor, KSysGuard) see it.
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