Patent ID: 8156492

Claim:
A system that improves memory usage in virtual machines running as hypervisor guests, comprising: a computer hardware or machine; a hypervisor executing on the computer hardware or machine; one or more guest operating systems executing as guests within the hypervisor, wherein each of the one or more guest operating systems has associated therewith a balloon driver, a virtual machine, for executing a software application, a memory space or heap for use by the virtual machine in storing software objects and pointers as part of the software application, and a garbage collector for use by the virtual machine in garbage collecting of the software objects within the memory space or heap; and wherein the system receives information about the usage of the memory space or heap by the virtual machine, and uses the balloon driver to control the use of a compacting garbage collector and to manage the memory space or heap size as necessary for use by the one or more guest operating systems executing as guests within the hypervisor.