VMware Fusion and RAM

[JavaWizKid]

Hi,
After using VMware Fusion and Windows XP for a while the active ram went up in my iStat Menus obviously. However when i closed VMware Fusion with CMD Q, the active ram still stayed at 1gb and I can't get it down without a reboot. Why doesn't the ram go into inactive or free and make room for other apps. Also after using Fusion I notice everything runs a lot slower, I'm guessing it's that half my ram is being used on nothing?
Thanks.

 

[HLdan]

To restore ram you don't have to reboot. When you do a permissions repair it will do it.

 

[JavaWizKid]

What's a permissions repair and how do you do it?

 

[JavaWizKid]

Why does the ram usage stay so high when nothing is open?

 

[JavaWizKid]

I did a permissions repair, however it still ran slowly. What is going on? I paid money for this so I could use it without having to reboot my machine every time I'm finished with it.

 

[tibi08]

It has nothing to do with repair permissions whatsoever. It's called a memory leak and it comes from badly written software. VMWare Fusion is a very demanding application and is bound to slow down your system; if it were programmed better then your Mac would recover properly when you exit.

 

[JavaWizKid]

So VMware fusion is badly written?

 

[ziation]

Unix variant systems (like Mac OS *) do not manage physical memory the same as MS DOS (windows). Just because the memory is not free'd to the 'free' pool upon application exit, does not mean it is a memory leak. Unix/Linux kernels gobble up as much memory as they can for normal operation and cache this memory for quicker future access. When Fusion (or any other application) exits, the memory is not free'd but it is marked as inactive and is available for all other uses.

If you open up a terminal window and execute the 'top' command, you can see the details of memory usage, for example:

PhysMem: 1570M wired, 1081M active, 1405M inactive, 4058M used, 38M free.

Here is a snapshot from my Macbook Pro at this very moment. As you can plainly see, I supposedly only have 38 MB available out of 4gig of RAM but if you look at the 'active' and 'inactive' portions, you can see that only about a gig is being actively used and almost 1.5 gig's is designated inactive. This memory is available to any process that needs it.

 

[JavaWizKid]

But all other applications run VERY SLOW. If the memory was free, the other programs would run faster.

 

[KingYaba]

To restore ram you don't have to reboot. When you do a permissions repair it will do it.

This. All one has to do is simply verify permissions with disk utility. Don't have to click the repair button. The memory sucked up by VMware and then listed as Inactive (when VMware quit) will be freed up.

 

[JavaWizKid]

That's annoying to have to do that every time you use VMware Fusion.

 

[BroadcastDoc]

No, if you have to do it every time, something is very wrong with the software on your machine.

I use VMWare Fusion on a daily basis, and I never have to reboot. I leave VMWare on all day (running Outlook) and don't have any memory issues.