High CPU usage after a few minutes of in-activity

[tarasis]

Hi

A new owner of VMWare Fusion 7 here, I'm running Fusion version 7.0.1 on Yosemite 10.10.1 with Guest OS Windows 10 (Build 9879) on a Mid 2009 13" MacBook Pro.

The performance compared to Virtual Box is massive and led to me taking advantage of the Black Friday offer, but I've noticed that after a few minutes of inactivity in the VM Window that the CPU usage climbs to 100% (vmware-vmx + kernel), but after I swap back to the VM and wait a short time the CPU usage drops off completely.

There are no tasks running in Windows that I can see and no apps running  either. Whats happening?

(Also Unity doesn't appear to work properly, there are odd empty boxes and the desktop half appears on top of my existing OS X desktop)

[arang]

This may not be your issue, but I see my Windows VM sometimes doing “background” tasks of some sort when it’s been idle for a while. These are visible when starting the Task Manager in Windows, and then choosing the Processes tab and clicking on “Show Processes from all users”. Some of these seem to be search-related, some are anti-virus (not Windows per se), some have unclear purposes (at least to me). So this may just be Windows deciding that your system is idle (after all, the virtual machine is) and taking advantage of the opportunity to run some operating system tasks when they won’t interfere with an active user. Windows seems to be very quick at pausing these tasks once it detects user activity again, which could explain why they stop once you switch back to the VM.

[shanief]

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