Virtual PC memory issues

I have installed a virtual machine on this laptop and allocated only 2 cores out of 20 and 4 GB RAM out of 16 GB. However, the system becomes slow and memory usage increases to around 72%. This is unusual because the Intel i7 processor has 20 cores and 16 GB RAM, and I have allocated only 25% of the total memory. The virtual machine is running Windows 7 with only a few high-performance tasks or applications installed.

asadermo said:

I have installed a virtual machine on this laptop and allocated only 2 cores out of 20 and 4 GB RAM out of 16 GB. However, the system becomes slow and memory usage increases to around 72%. This is unusual because the Intel i7 processor has 20 cores and 16 GB RAM, and I have allocated only 25% of the total memory. The virtual machine is running Windows 7 with only a few high-performance tasks or applications installed.

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What HOST are you running the VM on, what's the VM software and what's the GUEST you are running and how much RAM and vCPU's have you allocated. Note that for VM's there isn't a 1 :1 relationship between RAM requirements for Physical and Virtual machines.

An i7 of any sort can easily run a whole slew of VM's even concurrently - note though any W11 guest needs a 4GB RAM allocation as a bare minimum - so if you allocate 8GB for a W11 VM that should be more than enough. The other issue is decent HDD / SSD performance. So you need to ensure that the disk device where your VM is on is not "over committed" with being used for other Host processes.

An i7 running W7 as a VM should hardly know that it's running anything extra !!!!

Cheers
jimbo

The VM software is the virtualbox, windows 11 is installed on both HOST and GUEST, A screenshot is attached herein for the deatils information.

do you have the VirtualBox extension pack installed within VirtualBox.

best of luck Steve ..

Yes extension pack installed within VirtualBox but the issue is still exist

@asadermo

I'd get rid of "nested paging and virtualisation" and turn off HYPER-V if you aren't using it. Plus with that i7 up the vCPU count for the VM to something like 8.

I'd also disable secure boot for the VM assuming you are using it (From the VM's BIOS NOT THE HOST'S if you can) and disable any sort of bit locker / other encryption on the VM as well. As for paging - better to dedicate specific fast devices as well if you can both for HOST and GUEST - avoid sharing. Slow I/O or over committed I/O will kill any system, real or virtual and for ANY OS !!. On the VM i'd turn of indexing too if you've enabled that -- not sure why you'd need it on the type of VM you are running.

Cheers
jimbo

It seems to me that you are misunderstanding the memory it takes to run the guest OS.

Your pc needs around 4GB just to run host Windows, then some memory say 2 to 3 GB to run the virtualbox app and then 4GB to run yiur Windows 7 host within virtualbox, so to use 10 or 11 GB seems pretty reasonable to me. As @jimbo45 says, you should probably increase cores to around 8.

Note: if your guest OS needs more than 4GB RAM, it will use "virtual" pagefiling and that will be another memory overhead at the host level. It is more efficient to increase the RAM in the guest OS rather than relying on virtual pagefiling.

Frankly, you will get significantly better performance using Hyper-V provided you do not need sound in your Windows 7 guest.

According to his system specs, he’s running an AMD Ryzen with 11 Home, so Hyper-V would not be an option.