[ Comments below, in line ]
On Monday 17 August 2009 at 7:58 am, Gordan Bobic penned
about "Re: [vbox-users] Memory Overcommit and Recursive Paging"
> On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:56:16 -0500, Bruce MacArthur <bmacas...@fastmail.us>
> wrote:
>
> > The inquiry that Klaus posted relates to "your HOST {my emphasis} OS".
> > You state that "Both guests were Windows XP -- but this says nothing at
> > all about the HOST machine. Would you care to address his "real"
> > concern?
>
> Sorry, my bad. The host OS is Linux, RHEL5.3.
The short-answer is you've over-commited your machine.
The slightly longer answer is each VM is a Unix process running on
your host. Given their memory needs, they've been configured to take
all the physical RAM of your machine. Because of the nature of the
application running with the process, all RAM is pre-allocated: 2GB.
The Host O/S will attempt to run VM #1 and when VM #2 wants to run, it
swaps out VM #1 completely to run VM #2. At this point 2GB of swap
are used. Next, VM #1 wishes to run again, your O/S swaps out VM #2
so yet another 2GB of swap is used.
Your machine probably crawls because the there is no room for the
normal Linux kernel processes to run in RAM. Much less any user-level
applications.
Pictorially, what you have is the following:
Host O/S RAM
+----------------------------------------------------+
| |
+----------------------------------------------------+
[ VM #1 ][ VM #2 ]
what you want is something like:
Host O/S RAM
+----------------------------------------------------+
| |
+----------------------------------------------------+
[ Host processes ] [ VM #1 ][ VM #2 ]
I mentioned my set up:
o 6GB of Physical RAM,
o 1.5 GB for VM #1 and 768MB for VM #2: roughly 2.25 GB for VM's
6 - 2.25 = 3.75GB free for other `stuff' on the Host.
I hope the above helps.
Cheers,
--
Pablo Sanchez - Blueoak Database Engineering, Inc
Ph: 819.459.1926 Fax: 760.860.5225 (US)
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