Opened 3 years ago
Closed 3 years ago
#20373 closed defect (duplicate)
Excessive Effective Memory Consumption on Mac OS
| Reported by: | bbyingto | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | other | Version: | VirtualBox 6.1.22 |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Guest type: | other | Host type: | Mac OS X |
Description
Ever since at least VirtualBox 6.1.4 and later, VirtualBox has been consuming 2X the requested RAM. My main use for my 16GB 2015 MacBook is to run a virtual 12GB Centos VM for development. The host system might do some light web browsing, but otherwise is not heavily utilized and the physical machine is pretty much dedicated to the VM. If I use VirtualBox 6.1.2 then I have a perfectly stable system. If I use a newer version of VirtualBox then within a small number of hours (depending on how actively I use the virtual machine) my MacBook will start heavily swapping memory and become very unresponsive. I used to have to struggle multiple times a day to forcibly kill off my vm instance before my whole laptop effectively locked up, until I realized that downgrading to 6.1.2 fixed my issue. Of course, 6.1.2 is not compatible with the latest OSX versions, so this cannot be a permanent solution.
I'm going to save you some effort and make it clear this is almost certainly a duplicate of issue 19726. I've been light on concrete technical details here, but there are plenty there, as well as a relatively large number of affected users just waiting for the opportunity to present more. However that ticket is nearly a year old, and for some reason, being actively ignored despite a steady trickle of new activity.
The apparent reason that ticket is being ignored is that someone determined by code inspection that the reported issue is impossible. That seems simply ludicrous to me. There are many affected users with demonstrably unstable systems, with more steadily trickling in over time. Some comments in the other ticket indicate that visual bugs may be causing users to see fictitious memory usages, but even if something like that is the case then that is no reason to ignore the real system stability issues being observed by multiple people. Users may be mistaken as to why their machine is becoming unresponsive, but the fact that it's becoming unresponsive is pretty hard to miss.
If you need help getting a reproducing system, there are several users who have offered to do whatever it takes to provide that. Heck, even if you just don't have the manpower to take this on you'd get sympathy if you just said as much. As is, the other ticket reads like you straight up don't believe a group of your users, and that both disheartening and frustrating.
#20372