low free memory + vmware fusion vm resume

[runeasgar]

ok, so i understand the principle of mac memory management. memory typically isn't "freed", and is instead marked as inactive in case it is needed again soon.

in fact, that's caused me to have extremely quick suspend / resumes in vmware fusion when i'm frequently starting and stopping it.

HOWEVER.. over the course of the day my memory gets chewed up by applications other than vmware.. such that none of the inactive memory belongs to it.

then, when i go to resume windows 7, with 20-30mb of free memory, it CRAAAAAAAAAWLS. it takes forever to start up. it may take 5 minutes before i can actually do anything with it, and in the meantime my entire system chokes.

all i ever hear is that the memory management is by design -- but why does this affect my ability to start up a virtual machine so severely?

is there anything i can do?

i've already lowered its memory allocation to 768mb in an effort to reduce the situations where that occurs.

for clarity, my memory usage may read something along the following when this situation occurs:
wired: 1gb
active: 1gb
inactive: almost 2gb
free: 20-30mb

i have 4gb total.

 

[Patrick J]

Not really fixing your problem, but you can try Parallels (free trial). VMWare crawled on my Macbook Pro no matter what; Parallels made it much faster. You can import your virtual machine from VM to Parallels.