Compressed Memory and Virtualization

[Silvereel]

Just curious... Does compressed memory make virtualization, with apps like Parallels or VMware, any more efficient than it was on previous versions of OS X? It's just one of the heavy lifting tasks that ones to mind when I think of memory, and I can't wait to see what kind if benefits there'll be from that.

 

[dsdevries]

Just curious... Does compressed memory make virtualization, with apps like Parallels or VMware, any more efficient than it was on previous versions of OS X? It's just one of the heavy lifting tasks that ones to mind when I think of memory, and I can't wait to see what kind if benefits there'll be from that.

Absolutely! As a front-end developer I use VirtualBox to run various versions of windows with various versions of IE for cross-browser testing. In Mountain lion I was only capable of running my IDE (netBeans), Application server (Liferay), a few Browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera) and one extra virtual machine. I had to shut down a virtual machine before I could startup another one. Now with Mavericks I'm able to run Windows XP with IE6, Windows 7 with IE8 and Windows 8 with IE10 side-by-side with absolutely no slow-downs.

The new Multi-monitor support is also a blessing!

I'm using a Late 2011 15" macBook pro (2.4GHz Core i7) with 8gb of RAM.