Shared folder memory leak

[Sean]

I'm using VirtualBox 4.0.8 on an OS X 10.6.7 host with Ubuntu 11.04 as a guest operating system.

The bug involves shared folders and leaking memory. Whenever I have a folder mounted, memory is slowly consumed by VirtualBox. The memory shows up when I run 'top', but not as being used by a process, just that it's consumed by something that isn't internal to the guest OS. I can watch it consume more and more as time progresses. Typically if I develop for a few hours, walk away to get lunch and come back, sometime in between my guest OS starts to crash because it's out of memory.

I have attached a screenshot that is about 60 minutes of use after a reboot. All I have done is executed ant/javac a handful of times for development. If I leave it in this state and leave, when I come back the VirtualBox console will show out-of-memory errors and I'll have to restart it.

[Sean]

Inside the guest Ubuntu install as well as Activity Monitor showing the memory consumption

[Frank Mehnert]

So the memory leak appears inside the guest OS, not the host OS?

[Frank Mehnert]

Note that the guest memory is allocated on demand. That is, as long as the guest does not require all physical memory it will probably use less memory than configured in the VM settings. So if as long as you don't see growing the amount of memory occupied by the VM process beyond the configured guest RAM size (plus some space required for maintaining the VM), there is NO leak. For instance, if you configure 512MB for your guest then check if the RAM usage still grows beyond 800MB.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.