How can Virtual Machine grab more RAM than what is allocated?

Hello Community!

I installed VirtualBox on my Mac and installed Windows 11 in a Virtual Machine.

Windows was constantly freezing and I had to force power off the VM several times.

Upon inspection, I found that it was occupying 8.5 GB RAM, even though my Macbook has only 8 GB ram. How is this possible?

I had allocated only 4 GB ram under VirtualBox settings. It not only breached the ram allocated by VirtualBox by more than 2 times, it also occupied more RAM than what is present in my system.

Double mystery.

I reduced the RAM to 3 GB, but that hasn't helped.



It has still grabbed pretty much all available memory, much more than what is allocated by VirtualBox.

Perhaps this is the issue

From my reading, it's not only VBox affected, but other tools like Docker and such. I found the BugTracker in VBox for this and they are concluding the same.

pparks1 said:

From my reading, it's not only VBox affected, but other tools like Docker and such. I found the BugTracker in VBox for this and they are concluding the same.

View attachment 16851

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I tried VMware, and still the same. It appears Apple isn't interested in resolving the issue.

TheMystic said:

I tried VMware, and still the same. It appears Apple isn't interested in resolving the issue.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I've got a MacBook Pro, but it's circa 2014 now, so getting a bit long in the tooth and only has 8GB of RAM. I use it for basic web surfing these days, but run my VM's on my desktop that has 64GB of RAM (Specifically for VM use).

My Mac was okay, but I'm one of those who isn't really enamored with it. I don't find Apple stuff to be intuitive whatsoever.

The Guest Additions can change the amount of host memory that a VM uses, while the machine is running. Because of how this is implemented, this feature is called memory ballooning.

Somewhat off topic, but you might experience more reliable performance with VMWare Fusion Player, which is now available and also free.
They just released it for M1 Macs too.

FreeBooter said:

The Guest Additions can change the amount of host memory that a VM uses, while the machine is running. Because of how this is implemented, this feature is called memory ballooning.

4.10. Memory Overcommitment

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Memory ballooning isn't necessarily applicable here. WIth memory ballooning, let's say that you have a physical computer with 8GB of RAM. With memory ballooning, if you wanted to run each VM with say 4GB of RAM, you could run a grand total of 2 VM's. But with balloning, the system can "borrow" unused memory from one VM and allocate it to another when need be. So, depending upon your workload it's possible to start up 3 VM's, each having 4GB of RAM which ultimately would appear to be using 12 GB of RAM, but since there isn't really that much physical RAM to back it up, it's borrowing unused memory from VM1 and VM2 to provide to VM3.

pparks1 said:

Yeah, I've got a MacBook Pro, but it's circa 2014 now, so getting a bit long in the tooth and only has 8GB of RAM. I use it for basic web surfing these days, but run my VM's on my desktop that has 64GB of RAM (Specifically for VM use).

My Mac was okay, but I'm one of those who isn't really enamored with it. I don't find Apple stuff to be intuitive whatsoever.

Click to expand...

I bought the Mac more as a tool to test out the hype behind Macs. It was more of an unplanned, impulsive purchase. I wish I had waited for the 16 GB variant which was out of stock then. Also, the 8 GB variant I picked up was on sale. At the time, it was good enough for what I bought it for.

But given that it was natively supporting Windows, I had made up my mind to only buy Macs going forward, so I can enjoy both macOS and Windows. With Apple moving chip production in-house and Microsoft calling Windows for ARM an 'unsupported scenario', things are back to square one.

Apple being Apple, they don't care about user requirements. They want users to learn and do things the way they want, with very little flexibility. Despite the new Macs being extremely attractive due to their speed and efficiency, the lack of support for Windows and Virtualization is a big deal breaker.

With this Memory problem being discussed for well over a year and still being unaddressed, it is quite possible that Virtualization is an 'unsupported scenario' for Mac for the foreseeable future. And with macOS actually running pretty smoothly on my 2013 Windows laptop, may be my next computer could well be another Windows PC with a high-end configuration.

But that's still quite some time away. Let's see.

FreeBooter said:

The Guest Additions can change the amount of host memory that a VM uses, while the machine is running. Because of how this is implemented, this feature is called memory ballooning.

4.10. Memory Overcommitment

Click to expand...

Then what is the purpose of assigning a value to RAM and processor count?

Besides, they say it is not applicable for OS X hosts (4.10.1) under notes in the 1st para.

ish4d0w said:

Somewhat off topic, but you might experience more reliable performance with VMWare Fusion Player, which is now available and also free.
They just released it for M1 Macs too.

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No. I tried with VMware too and the memory consumption is still double of what is allocated under VM settings. In my case, there is noticeable lag even without doing much. So Virtualization is not a good option on Mac as of now.

I don't know how Windows using Parallels performs.

Just curious, is there a reason that VM's or at least Hyper-V can't use virtual memory or the pagefile for memory?