My old Dell m-6400 with 8GB RAM running Win7 x64 SP1 has BOINCMGR.EXE grabbing 2.2 GB of virtual memory. It only has a few projects attached Is it reserving vram for the VBox machines? I'm running VBox projects on other computers and their BOINCMGR.EXE only claims about 350-450MB vram. This machine with 31 projects attached is claiming 149MB vram also on Win 7 x64 Pro SP1. I'm pretty sure that I installed VBox independently of BOINC on all the machines instead of using the combined installer. All the machines have VBox 5.0.10 installed and the 7.6.9 combined installer came with VBox 4.3.34(?).

I'll try installing the 7.6.22 version later and see if the issue continues but was curious how BOINCMGR.EXE decides on the amount of vram to reserve.

First things first, terminology: VRAM == memory on a videocard, fully called Video RAM, hence abbreviated to VRAM. If you need to abbreviate virtual memory, it's VM. Yes, the same as Virtual Machine.

Second, where do you look for the virtual memory usage of BOINC Manager? I just checked if it's a column option in Windows Task Manager or in Resource Monitor, but neither has the option. Unless it's named differently.

I even tried to set up a Performance Monitor for it, but haven't found a correct option yet. So what do you use?

Also, is this bog standard BOINC Manager, or did you set for instance to use unlimited Event Log through cc_config.xml?

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My old Dell m-6400 with 8GB RAM running Win7 x64 SP1 has BOINCMGR.EXE grabbing 2.2 GB of virtual memory. It only has a few projects attached Is it reserving vram for the VBox machines? I'm running VBox projects on other computers and their BOINCMGR.EXE only claims about 350-450MB vram. This machine with 31 projects attached is claiming 149MB vram also on Win 7 x64 Pro SP1. I'm pretty sure that I installed VBox independently of BOINC on all the machines instead of using the combined installer. All the machines have VBox 5.0.10 installed and the 7.6.9 combined installer came with VBox 4.3.34(?).

I'll try installing the 7.6.22 version later and see if the issue continues but was curious how BOINCMGR.EXE decides on the amount of vram to reserve.

Are you sure? I think you have misread the units that resource monitor is listing. They are in K = 1000 bytes, not M = 1,000,000 bytes. Your figures then are close to my Win 7 machine.

@Jord, launch task manager, goto performance tab, click resource monitor button.
In resource monitor <ed>Overview tab, CPU pane, click checkbox for bonicmgr.exe
Now scroll panes <not tab> down to Memory. Commit, Working, Shared and Private are displayed for the PID.

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First things first, terminology: VRAM == memory on a videocard, fully called Video RAM, hence abbreviated to VRAM. If you need to abbreviate virtual memory, it's VM. Yes, the same as Virtual Machine.

Second, where do you look for the virtual memory usage of BOINC Manager? I just checked if it's a column option in Windows Task Manager or in Resource Monitor, but neither has the option. Unless it's named differently.

I even tried to set up a Performance Monitor for it, but haven't found a correct option yet. So what do you use?

Also, is this bog standard BOINC Manager, or did you set for instance to use unlimited Event Log through cc_config.xml?

Sorry, I know that virtual memory has the same abbrev as virtual machine so I use vram in my mind for virtual memory and vidram for video. I forgot to translate into common usage.

ProcessHackerPortable is a nice analyzer program. There are a couple others at that site in the utility section.

I'll try installing the 7.6.22 version later and see if the issue continues but was curious how BOINCMGR.EXE decides on the amount of vram to reserve.

Are you sure? I think you have misread the units that resource monitor is listing. They are in K = 1000 bytes, not M = 1,000,000 bytes. Your figures then are close to my Win 7 machine.

I knew what a kilobyte was in 1977 from reading Byte Magazine and text books on computer science that I checked out of the library and read in my spare time.
Boincmgr.exe has virtualized memory space of 2.18 Gigabytes according to ProcessHacker.

Win 7 Resource Monitor doesn't show how much virtual memory a process is laying claim to and it's just odd that BOINCMGR.EXE's code is setting up over a 2 GB address space on one Win 7 machine but not on the other two Win 7 machines which are not running ATLAS (They're BOINCMGR.EXE show about 149 MB on each). Version 7.6.22 shows the same results when I switched to Sysinternals Process Explorer to compare results:

The virtual size column matches the size of the RAM that my personally created VBox machines are requesting. Their private bytes will never be close to their virtual size, though they use up their entire virtual size in RAM/swap. That is why I was wondering if BOINCMGR.EXE was acting on behalf of the VM's by placing a virtual RAM claim of over 2 GB because this machine was running ATLAS, which supposedly has 2 GB RAM virtual machines. The ATLAS machines each show virtual sizes of 218 MB instead of the 2,000MB I was expecting.


To throw a twist in, I checked the virtual memory claims of BOINCMGR.EXE on WinX and it's claiming 32.9 Gigabytes there. The coders have assigned huge amounts in their declarations or the process explorers are broken under WinX.

BTW, the one positive attribute that ProcessHacker had over other choices so that I chose it for daily use, was it's rt-click option to reduce any process' working set which is much nicer than some other mass RAM cleaning utilities.