Overcommitting of memory (swap in/out)

[IuK]

I always get HostMemoryLow e.g. Knoppix 5.2. VMware and Microsoft Virtual PC work on this PC (IBM Thinkpad T40, 512 Mb RAM). I have enclosed the Logfile. How can I help?

[Sander van Leeuwen]

You don't have enough memory in your machine. Reduce the ram size of the VM to 128 MB or less. VMWare and VPC swap memory in and out; VBox currently doesn't.

[Ralf_W]

There seems to be another reason for the HostMemoryLow error:

I have 3Gb of memory on my XP host, 2Gb assigned to my ubuntu guest. It's possible to work for hours, but suddenly the machine is halted with

00:14:54.616 NAT: DHCP offered IP address 10.0.2.15
09:47:58.916 NAT: DHCP offered IP address 10.0.2.15
09:48:29.243 pgmr3PhysGrowRange: out of memory. pause until the user resumes execution.
09:48:29.243 Changing the VM state from 'RUNNING' to 'SUSPENDED'.
09:48:29.887 Console: VM runtime error: fatal=false, errorID=HostMemoryLow message="Unable to allocate and lock memory. The virtual machine will be paused. Please close applications to free up memory or close the VM."

The host had still about 700k of free memory. The guest-machine really posessed 2Gb, cause memory usage was 2.3Gb when the SUSPEND occurred and after closing the VM, memory usage was at 330k.

I'll attach the complete log.

[Ralf_W]

Since my last visit I've increased host memory to 4Gb (resulting in ~3.5 Gb usable memory under XP).

• When giving 2 Gb to the virtual machine, the HostMemoryLow error continues to happen.
• After reducing VM memory to 1.5 Gb (=less than half of my usable memory) the problem did not occur for serveral days.

Does VirtualBox perform something like a realloc?
If so, could you provide an option to allocate all memory at startup and avoid reallocation?