On Tuesday 26 May 2009, Claudius Hubig wrote: > >> How is this enforced? i.e. what happens when you attempt to overcommit > >> memory? > > > >VM won't start. > > Sorry, but: > > System: 2 GB RAM, 2 GB Swap (specially created for this test!). OS: > Debian Unstable/2.6.28 > > Normal memory usage for Gnome & running apps: ~700 MB > > VM 1: WinXP with 512 MB RAM (started well) > VM 2: Win7 with 1024 MB RAM (did so as well) > VM 3: Debian/LXDE with 512 MB RAM (was able to start it, too). > VM 4: WinXP with 256 MB RAM (slooooowly). > > All these machines started well - obviously, the machine was of no > use anymore swapping like hell, but it did work.
Right, because one of the VMs were running a Linux guest. Windows usually touches the whole RAM during startup, therefore all assigned physical guest RAM has to be allocated by VirtualBox. Linux is a bit more friendly and touches into physical RAM only if required. VirtualBox will allocate the physical RAM in 1MB chunks. So if you are doing some memory-intensive operation in the Debian VM, the host will start to heavily swapping as it will try to lock the required memory. In the worst case, the host will be unusable. Kind regards, Frank -- Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert Sun Microsystems, Inc. www.sun.com
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