!rant

I started learning to use Hadoop recently, and am running a VM with all I need installed on it (the HDF Sandbox to be exact). The VM wants 8GB to run and my laptop only has just that, except it also needs to run Windows at the same time...

At first I thought I was screwed, that I'd need a more capable computer to learn. I gave it a shot anyway, and told VirtualBox to give the VM 4GB, hoping the VM itself would use RAM swap to function. And it did!

What I didn't expect was Windows not slowing down even a bit. Turns out Windows can triple the computer's RAM with virtual memory that it keeps on disk.

So the bottom line is: my VM is using 4GB as if it was 8GB, and at the moment my Windows is using 8GB as if they were 14GB. All of this without breaking a sweat. The more you know!