How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?

>Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used, I stepped down to 3 cores and 6 GB, to discover that memory usage fell to 3.9 GB and everything worked well. With just 2 cores and 4 GB of memory only 3.1 GB of that was used, and the VM continued to handle those lightweight tasks normally.

Good reminder that there's a certain amount of memory tied up with each core (probably mainly page cache and concurrency handling etc).

> Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used

But... if you start applications inside your VM it will want the full 8 Gb you've allocated not the 5 Gb it uses at startup?

I'm wondering if the Xcode simulator (without Xcode running) performs as well, my 2020 Intel MacBook Air has been incapable of running Safari in iOS smoothly for nearly all its life.