Visual Studio + Dual Monitors + Unity

[b77]

I find that Visual Studio 2008 is very sluggish in unity mode. Unity seems to mainly affect the responsiveness of the keyboard and mouse events in the IDE.

Because of this I'm running Windows XP fullscreen on a single monitor. I open my Mac application on my other monitor. In fullscreen mode Visual Studio runs fine. I hoping that there's some suggestions out there on how or if I can optimize my guest or host machine to run unity without the slugishness.

My maching is a MacPro running Fusion 2.0.1. 2 x 2.8 Xeon Quad (8 cores), 10GB memory, Dual monitors (both 1920 x 1200). ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.

My XP virtual machine is using 2048MB RAM, 1 Virtual Processor, 2 Shared Folders, 3D enabled, 60GB IDE disk, Autoprotect is enabled.

Would upgrading my video card to an Nvidia 8800 help?

Thanks!

[admin]

I find that Visual Studio 2008 is very sluggish in unity mode.

Do other guest apps have this problem, or is it just Visual Studio 2008?

In fullscreen mode Visual Studio runs fine.

Are you using one or all displays in fullscreen? If not all, try that and check performance.

What are your monitor resolutions?

[b77]

All apps, though I primarily use Visual Studio and it seems to affect VS the most.

The first problem is with the mouse. When I click to begin a selection, starting drag something, or begin scrolling any application window, it takes almost exactly 1 second before my clickdrag is registered. The mouse tracking is fine and standard button clicks are very responsive. Only the clickdrag is delayed. This happens every time.

The second is with the keyboard. Randomly when I start typing text into a text buffer window, there will occasionally be a delay between keystrokes. It almost feels like there's a background process running wild for a second even though the processor doesn't spike. This delay lasts about a quarter of a second, and is more of a distraction than anything.

Neither one of these issues happen in fullscreen mode.

I use one display, and I tested fullscreen all displays and it works just as well as one.

1920 x 1200 for both displays.

Thanks!

[b77]

It looks like I found a post with someone having a similar (maybe same) issue with the mouse problem

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/166336;jsessionid=36F4A0CF841B43EF0D2189B4628E0309?tstart=-1

[mikeydelamonde]

Hi there,

I thought I would just add to this with my own experience. I use Windows 2008 Server in Fusion 2.0.2 and have the same problem with the 'drag-lag' in Unity. This is really annoying as doing Visual Studio coding in Fusion is almost perfect except for this problem. It's most noticeable when I drag to select text with the cursor because you expect it to be very quick, but it also happens anywhere where you hold left-button/drag. Then everything freezes for 0.5 secs and then works just as fast as before, even if you still have the button down.

Please fix!!

[GabrielM]

Still experiencing the same behavior with Fusion 3.0... I would love to use Unity, but for this reason I'm using full screen or windowed mode.

Any official acknowledgement by VMware on this issue?

[sailesh_a]

Still experiencing the same behavior with Fusion 3.0... I would love to use Unity, but for this reason I'm using full screen or windowed mode.

Any official acknowledgement by VMware on this issue?

Hi, Gabriel. This issue should be fixed in Fusion 3.0.

Typing, clicking, selecting text using mouse should all be as fast as in full screen mode.

If you're seeing slowness then could you verify the following:

- does the problem exist in full screen

- is the problem specific to a single app or does it happen in all apps

- is typing slow?

- is text selection using the mouse slow?

Thanks

[GabrielM]

Typing, clicking, and selecting text using mouse is still slower than in windowed or full screen. I am on a Mac Pro, 10gb of RAM, with a clean install of Windows 7 64-bit on VMware 3. 2 CPUs are assigned to my VM (I have 4 cores). My MacBook Pro behaves the same with 1 CPU assigned to the VM.

Full screen mode performs perfectly, and has always worked correctly for me in 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. The typing, clicking and selecting lag happens in all applications, and is the most annoying when I'm programming in SQL Management Studio or Visual Studio. There is always a lag when typing, selecting a window or clicking on a menu.

There have been other threads on this issue on the forums, it is clear to me that it has not been fixed.

[GabrielM]

I just tried with notepad and it behaves the same. Also, the mouse pointer is constantly flickering, and there seems to be issues with focus between Windows.

[sailesh_a]

Hi Gabriel, thanks for the detailed response.

I'll follow up with you by PM to see if I can narrow down the root cause of the performance problems you're experiencing.

Thanks,

Sailesh

[GabrielM]

Thank you very much. I will do whatever I can to assist you with this issue.