Changing default memory option to 256 to 1024 #51
Conversation
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My first XP machine only had 64MB of RAM, and it was fine! 256 is double the recommended amount, and seems fine! |
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Agreed :) but isn't the IE7 image Vista and the IE8-9 images Win7? I On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Richard Bradshaw
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Yeah, to be fair I'm just installing the others now, and assumed they were all XP except IE9. I will lift the RAM on the others. Is it possible to do something like 256 for XP, then 768 for the others by default? Some people might only have 2GB of RAM in their machine and find a full GB for the VM too much. On 3 Jan 2012, at 19:49, Ryan Krug wrote:
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Is this going to be merged in? |
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I agree that the memory should be raised for the non-XP VMs, but is a gig too much like @richbradshaw suggests? Perhaps 512 across the board would be sufficient? I've never had any memory issues in any of the VMs fwiw. If we can reach a consensus I'll merge. |
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I raised IE9 VM memory to 512 MB before first boot, thinking 256 MB are surely not sufficient. It booted so fine I decided to set it back to 256 MB, and I have no problems at all. I can understand if you decide to raise it to 512 MB, ok, but 1 GB is too much. I have a total of 2 GB on my office PC, and I think I'm not the only one with less than 4 GB of memory... |
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The ievms installer operates at the single-OS level. It installs a single VM for a single OS at a time. It is not aware that it might be installing many VMs sequentially nor is it aware that there may be other VMs available on the given host OS. For a single-OS installer, the amount of memory to assign to a VM is a solved problem: always and only go with the vendor's recommendation. For XP that's 128MB, for Vista and 7 that's 1GB. That the host machine may lack memory is not the installers responsibility. This may sound harsh, however once you start veering from the vendor's recommendation you veer into the land of making the configuration of the installed VMs such that it works well with a wide range of different hardware configurations. Your veer into the land of the subjective. The only responsibility of the installer in this respect is to sufficiently document the fact that the vendor recommendations are used to configure the VM memory needs. It is the responsibly of the owner of the machine running the host OS to ensure that sufficient hardware is available to run a given VM efficiently in just the same way that the owner is responsible for ensuring that sufficient hardware is available to run the host OS itself. It'd be lovely to provide ievms in such a way that a user could install all of the available VMs in one go with a configuration that allows for the smooth, concurrent running of all the VMs. This is not possible, it depends too greatly on the host for which the owner not the installer is responsible. Any VM memory configuration other than one following the vendor's recommendation is a subjective, dependent on the host machine and a matter of debate. We're not here to debate, we're here to make sure our great stuff works well in IE where relevant. And we should, in that capacity, be assumed competent enough to configure our VMs to meet our needs in whatever way that may vary from the installer-supplied vendor recommendation. |
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I think the solution here is to make the memory an option to the script. That provides people with a way to adjust it to whatever they see fit. I forked this repo last night to make the update prior to seeing this pull request. I will be submitting a new pull request that contains the update in the event that it is considered a better solution. |
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Submitted pull #82 |
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@webignition On the other hand, we only need to run Internet Explorer, that is, 1 application and a few services. There is no need to require 1 GB, especially where experience shows less is sufficient for most cases. People who have greater needs can change the amount of RAM themselves, it's quite easy (you can also add a howto in the readme if you want). |
In all but the IE6 image 256 seems to be pretty meager to boot Windows properly. What do you think about raising this with perhaps a note in the readme?