bootcamp performance?

[y10k]

In Parallels, bootcamp vm performance is lower than the native parallels vm performance. Is this the case in Fusion?

Also, I have installed both xp x64 pro and xp pro and I noticed that x64 has a significant performance improvement in all factors (CPU, 2D, Mem, HD, etc) over the regular xp. Could you comment on this (i.e. why...) ? Thanks.

[Andreas_Masur]

People have pretty much gotten similar results for both of your questions. It seems that virtual machine outperforms a virtual machine running off the BootCamp partition. Same goes for the comparison between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows guests.

Having said all this, there are some users out there that do not experience the "slowness" with 32-bit guests for example. Same goes for the BootCamp partition. So...there are kind of mixed reports out there and VMware is looking into this. If you search the forums, you will stumple across some of the topics...

Ciao, Andreas

[bgertzfield · Accepted solution]

Yes, a Boot Camp VM will not perform as well as one stored as a file on your Mac's hard drive. (Remember that Mac laptop and Mac mini hard drives are pretty slow to begin with—you should use an external hard drive if performance is important.)

Boot Camp VMs have slower disk access because Mac OS X does not buffer access to block devices. If this is an issue, you can use VMware Converter to make a clone of your Boot Camp installation and store it on your Mac.

[aliasme]

"Yes, a Boot Camp VM will not perform as well as one stored as a file on your Mac's hard drive."

Really? I honestly think I measured this in Parallels a while back and they were identical.

[bgertzfield]

Really? I honestly think I measured this in

Parallels a while back and they were identical.

Most disk access (like booting an operating system, starting programs, etc.) will be slower, yes.