First: good lord, someone is still using Windows NT 4.0 in 2017! Talking about getting your moneys worth![]()
Yeah...the NT is for a metadata program that was written in-house for a specific organization before they started keeping track of recorded time itself, and it never quite ran as well on anything later & no one ever updated it. This software is older than many of the people who use it, and the original person/people who wrote it probably retired back when Jaz drives were still considered extremely modern. The running joke is that one day they might decide to go all out and have a modern program written for a recent operating system like Windows 98 SE...
Second: when you suspend a vm all the memory contents get written to a file on disk. The application may still hold the memory so it can assign it to other vm's but I'm not entirely certain on that. Hypervisors tend to do their own resource (cpu, memory, etc.) management (they request a certain amount from the OS and manage whatever they are given themselves). If the hypervisor does give it back to the OS it probably is going to stay put until something else requires it.
Pausing a vm is a different thing because it only pauses use of the vm, the resources it uses are not being touched so there is no writing to disk.
Thanks! This is great to know. It also explains why my 2016 seems to load from suspend faster, which I assume is related to the SSD being several times the speed as my 2014, and I now see that the cache size increases upon suspending (which I never looked at before solely in regards to VMs!)
I just did an experiment with this and it appears to release most of the memory with suspend.




What is the purpose of the pause feature over suspend? (I've actually never used pause until I ran this test although I think at times I have incorrectly said "pause" when I was referring to "suspend".) Is this one of those features that was of more significance during the days of internal HDDs when large cached files would take a longer time to transfer from the HDD back into the RAM? (and, consequently, one might wish to hold those VM files in the RAM for faster access?)
Last edited: