Memory Management with Parallels 7

Hi everyone,

When I am running Parallels 7 (with a RHEL 6 virtual machine active), something weird is happening with my memory. My free memory slowly decreases to zero, at which point my system slows to a crawl until I kill an application - UI/programs become unresponsive or slow, etc. This then stops the crawl and gives me back control of the UI or programs but normally requires a painfully slow force-quit on an open application.

I also normally have a few other applications open, such as Chrome/Adium/Xcode/Twitter/iTunes and some text editors.

My understanding is that the Mac OS is supposed to free up the inactive RAM in these situations. I frequently have 2+ GB of inactive ram when this happens. In addition to roughly 2.5GB wired/active respectively (according to iStatMenus).

I do not believe this is happening correctly when Parallels 6 is running, given the above experiences.

What steps can I take to avoid this issue? The slowdown very clearly happens when the "free" memory is near zero - this has been consistent over the past weeks of using OS:X (snow leopard) and Parallels 7. The only solution I know is to restart, and not open apps I do not intend to use (because obviously quitting causes them to stay in inactive memory).

Any advice would be appreciated!

 

A partial solution - if you have installed developer tools you can run the terminal command "purge" which will reset most of your inactive memory. This doesn't solve the underlying problems but should work better than restarting continuously.