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On my up-to-date Windows 10 PC with its 16GB RAM, Task Manager shows close to 100% memory usage. This is not surprising, since I run a VirtualBox VM with over 10GB RAM, plus the usual desktop stuff, Office applications and the like.

The problem is, although Task Manager does indicate that physical memory is almost exhausted, the list of processes sorted by memory usage doesn't include anything that is close to the 10GB my VM is probably consuming right now. The largest consumer is currently Firefox with 730MB.

Resource Monitor is no different. When sorting by Working Set or Commit, I see Firefox at the top. Its Commit value is 1.5GB. All the VBox or VirtualBox processes have ridiculously low Commit and Working Set figures.

Is there a way to see the actual memory consumption of VirtualBox VMs?

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  • I can tell you that VirtualBox (and VMWare) virtual machines' memory (RAM) is deducted from system memory, the deducted memory will be displayed as hardware reserved in resource monitor, it is reallocated to be used only by the virtual machine (so normal host system programs can't use the RAM), as the way to see how much of the reallocated RAM is actually used by the VM, the easiest way to view that would be to view it in the VM, if you are running Windows 10 in the VM you already know the answer, if you are running Linux in the VM open System Monitor (or whatever it is called)
    – Ξένη Γήινος
    Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 5:42
  • You didn't specify what OS you are running inside the VM so I can't tell you the exact method to view that info.
    – Ξένη Γήινος
    Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 5:43
  • By the way, I also have 16GiB RAM, and I also run virtual machines, I run VMs using VMWare Workstation Player, I run Linux (x64) inside the VMs and I only allocated 4GiB RAM to each, and they run smoothly, I think 10GiB RAM for the VM is really overkill, that would leave you only 6GiB usable, if you really need to run VMs with 10GiB RAM you should consider upgrading to 32GiB RAM.
    – Ξένη Γήινος
    Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 5:50
  • My guest is Linux. It is true that the 10GB guest makes working with the PC difficult at times, but I need that size for running OpenStack. Task Manager shows me 280MB hardware reserved memory - it must be something else on my PC.
    – berndbausch
    Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 15:57

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The short answer to your question is simple. The VM Guest allocates as much RAM as you have chosen to give to it. So in your case, a full 10GB.

Virtualbox by default will allocate a fixed amount of memory. You can look at this like you would at a standard PC, it comes with X amount of memory. If you want to add or remove memory, you shut it down, do the physical operation and start the computer again.

It does however also support dynamic memory allocation. This works by providing more RAM to a machine while its running. They named it Memory Ballooning (4.10.1. Memory Ballooning).

Checking the amount of memory used by a ballooning VM, would be done using the command line interface VBoxManage with the switch showvminfo, for example VBoxManage showvminfo "My Windows VM" (Chapter 8. VBoxManage)

If you want more detailed RAM usage information for Windows in general, you could try using RAMMap. A small sysinternals tool. Bear in mind that running this in the virtual host will not reveal which processes are using memory in a virtual guest. You would have to run it in the virtual guest to see that.

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  • You say "the VM Guest allocates as much RAM as you have chosen to give to it". That is not the case. I have a 10GB guest, and when it is quiet, not even half of my 16GB on the host are used (and it's mostly used by applications other than the VM). I will look into the VBox command line commands, though I did hope there would be a way to get the data from Task Manager. RAMMap may help too.
    – berndbausch
    Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 15:55

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