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lmcmullen
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Windows 8 slowdown since upgrading to Yosemite and Fusion 7

Hi,

I was previously running Windows 8 pro in Fusion 6 on Mavericks. I had the VM configured with 2 processor cores and 4GB RAM. The main applications I use in Windows are as follows:


  • Visual Studio 2013
  • SQL Server Express
  • SQL Server Management Studio
  • IIS Express
  • Google Chrome (for testing and debugging with Dev Tools)

This setup worked completely fine, almost as good as a native Windows PC. I have recently upgraded to Yosemite and Fusion 7.0.1 along with upgrading VMWare Tools.


This has caused significant performance problems with my setup. Most notably:

  • The action I perform most is switching between VS2013 and Chrome (alt-tab), this used to be absolutely fine and for all intents and purposes was an instant switch. Now that same process can take anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds.
  • Opening dev tools in Chrome now takes on average about 5 seconds.
  • Making a DOM update in Chrome dev tools now takes a couple of seconds.
  • Attempting to inspect a DOM element (via the magnifying glass icon) now takes a couple of seconds.
  • Even switching between tabs in Chrome now takes anywhere up to 10 seconds which is just ridiculous. I never have more than about 5/6 Chrome tabs open at any time.


All of these used to be practically instant in the old setup.

All of these things combined for me are completely unacceptable. Although they are all only small amounts of time on their own, when they're added up it's leading to huge amounts of frustration and ultimately loads of unnecessary lost time.

I've done the usual of closing down any unnecessary background apps/services, I've increased the processor cores to 4 and increased the RAM to 6GB. Still no noticeable improvement.

To go from a setup which was working incredibly well and then supposedly "upgrading" and ending up with a setup which is significantly worse is very frustrating. I'm hoping that someone somewhere has come across something similar and can suggest something I can do to make my setup get back to somewhere near where it was before.

Many thanks,

Lee

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DrTone
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Shutdown your VM and change your hardware mode from 11 to 10 and restart your VM.  Your performance should be back to what you expect.  Fusion has MAJOR issues with hardware level 11.

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DrTone
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Shutdown your VM and change your hardware mode from 11 to 10 and restart your VM.  Your performance should be back to what you expect.  Fusion has MAJOR issues with hardware level 11.

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lmcmullen
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@DrTone: Thanks so much for the suggestion...switching to Hardware Mode 10 has improved performance immensely. Feels like it's back to normal again now.

I get a prompt to upgrade every time I start the VM now, no big deal at all and I'm not bothered by it.

It begs the question though, what features does Hardware Mode 11 give you over Hardware Mode 10?

Also presumably VMWare are aware of this problem and if so, should they really be prompting users to upgrade and promising performance benefits etc when clearly there is an issue?

Thanks again, most useful and much appreciated.

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DrTone
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Turn off the check box to check for upgrades and you won't get prompted it's in the same screen where you chose the vm version.

It is funny that VMWare 7 is promoted as xx% faster yet you have to run it using an older vm engine just to get similar performance as the last version.

jmichas
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OMG, thank you so much!

I too am a developer and use windows for Visual Studio and other dev tools. I have been struggling with performance for a while and it has been so frustrating. Intellisense in visual studio has been horrible, debug builds were slow, chrome was useless, etc.

Now things are usable again.

I really hate being held hostage by vmware to "upgrade" every year only to experience the same performance issues with each major version. Its ridiculous, we pay for the privilege of beta testing their software apparently. (thank god its a write off)

-Jason

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