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I have a quad-core Ubuntu (Lucid) laptop with 16GB RAM running VirtualBox OSE. I have a Windows 2003 Server VM running on VirtualBox which has been allocated 1.5GB. Once the virtual machine is powered up i can see it is consuming 700MB of it's allocation.

However, my Ubuntu host is reporting that the real VirtualBox process is consuming 6.1GB of my host RAM. Does anyone know why it does this and how i can get to only use what it needs. With this much memory it could almost host 4 copies of this single VM! :)

EDIT: The version of VirtualBox OSE i'm using is: 3.1.6_OSE r59338.

Thanks!

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One possibility is that you are also seeing the memory used by the VirtualBox process itself, although the amount you report is still highly unreasonable.

So it seems to me that you have found a memory leak or other memory bug in VirtualBox.

In google at least, the query "VirtualBox memory leak" returns 346,000 results, which are really too many to analyze further !

You might consider upgrading to the current VirtualBox version of 4.0.6, in the hope that the bug is fixed. If not, try to establish contact with the developers through the VirtualBox Community.

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  • Thanks @harrymc - it is the VirtualBox process itself that's using the 6.1GB of memory. I'm upgrading now to see if this is fixed in 4+.
    – alpian
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 15:01

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