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I'm very new to the world of computing and have started to use virtual machines. However, the one thing I don't understand is why my virtual machines dont use all the RAM I provide for them. I have a debian OS(64 bit) running on a windows 10(64 bit) host, and I have assigned the guest 2 gigabytes of RAM. When I boot on the OS, the virtual machine is experiencing some performance problems(eg. tabs and windows lagging, screen periodically freezes). I suspected I might not have enough RAM for it to run smoothly so I run the command:
free -m
from the info I gather, the vm has a total of 1956 megabytes of RAM however only seems to be using 729 megabytes of RAM.This is less than half of what I assigned it. Running on this low RAM would cause performance issues so I want the vm to be able to use more RAM at a time. Is there a reason why the vm is using so little RAM at a time and what can I do to make it use all the RAM assigned to get rid of performance problems?
1VirtualBox configures the maximum RAM that a VM can use. But it does not mean that VM will always use full RAM. – Biswapriyo – 2017-09-25T11:16:44.297
How much RAM has the HOST computer ? How much of that is free ? – Tonny – 2017-09-25T11:35:12.623
Care to post the full output of
free -m
(including theSwap
line, if any)? Otherwise, RAM may not be the issue, you could be I/O bound (using VBox shared folders? What is the disk I/O like form the Windows standpoint?) – xenoid – 2017-09-25T12:14:30.893