Unacceptably slow shared folders performance

[swineone]

I have a MacBook Pro 15" late-2013 with a 512 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM and a Core i7 2.6 GHz CPU, running VMware Fusion 8. The host OS is OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite) and the guest OS is Windows 10. My main use case for the VM is software development, and I have Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 installed on it, on which I use a plugin called VisualGDB (www.visualgdb.com), and there is a severe performance issue with my setup, which is severely dragging down my productivity. Here I should mention this is definitely not an issue with VisualGDB itself, and would most likely happen just the same with ordinary Visual Studio projects, it's just that I don't code in C# or VB to test a project in one of those languages.

Using VMware's built in sharing facilities, I shared my home folder from the host OS to the guest OS. I keep all my software projects in my host OS's home folder, and I access it from within Visual Studio using the shared folder.

The issue is this: performing a rebuild (Build menu -> Rebuild Solution in Visual Studio) of one of my projects over the shared folder takes 38 seconds (in another test, this took as long as 48 seconds; of which 15 seconds are spent just cleaning the project folder, which consists solely of deleting a number of files that's not more than a hundred). Now if I copy the project folder somewhere inside the Windows C: drive and perform the same rebuild when opening the project from there, it takes less than 7 seconds. The funny thing is that copying the project from my shared folder to the Windows C: drive takes about a second or two, I can't even time it accurately -- so why should accessing the same files from within VS be so slow? This is a 5.5x difference and is making me lose something in the vicinity of one hour every day waiting for compiles to finish. Even creating a network share from within Mac OS X (System Preferences -> Sharing -> File Sharing) is much faster than this at about 12 seconds; this is my preferred solution for now, but frankly I don't see just deleting less than a hundred .o files and reading in another hundred .c files should take an extra 6 seconds just because the file is on a shared folder (which is, of course, accessed over a loopback connection, so that no bytes are ever put on a physical wire, and the latency can probably be measured in microseconds).

Please note that, for various reasons related to my split Windows-Mac workflow, just copying the files to the C: drive instead of accessing them via the shared folder is not an acceptable solution. They must be kept in the shared folder at all times.

Are there any settings changes, or in general anything that I can do to speed up I/O operations on shared folders?

[BoukeYT]

This topic is amongst the reasons I've switched to Parallels. The original complaint is about 2 years old and still not resolved. I've mostly lost my confidence after VMware's inability to timely resolve crashing the latests MacBooks with Touchbar everytime it switched graphics cards. Must've lost quite a few hours of work due to this issue already.

[FusionUserHere]

I Just switched from Parallels to Fusion 10. Like it a lot more... except for this terribly slow shared folder speed. I have to wait for an excel file to save- Odd, its not very big..

Any update on slow shared folder performance? I feel like I'm back working with AppleTalk.

Thanks.

[hanksterr7]

I just solved this

I disabled Sophos antivirus on the mac, and the horrible performance in windows when accessing folders shared by the mac vanished!

I have all of the mirroring options enabled (desktop, downloads, documents, pictures, movies, music), and I also enable sharing of my users/<my name> folder on the mac. I tried excluding access to users/<my name> but the problem persists until I turn off "enable automatic scanning for maximum security" in the Sophos Home website that configures my local Sophos application

I tried first doing the virtual drive cleanup and that accomplished nothing

Hope this helps someone

[rvogo]

For me too, over the past months, performance became absolutely unbearable.

I was not able to isolate what was the main issue, but various upgrades of Office (O365), Windows 7 to 10, Mac OS Sierra to High Sierra and Fusion 8 to 10 (for the High Sierra update)

Currently on Win7 / Office v1710 / Fusion 10.0.1 / Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.1

Skimming through various posts led me to convert my VM's Virtual HW back from v14 to v11 , which did improve things quite drastically.

However, I still hat this slowness when browsing the shared folder with Windows Explorer stalling for up to 40s on initial access for no apparent reason.

Disabling/removing Sophos AV also did the trick, and this was completely unexpected because it was not showing any activity whatsoever. Thanks hanksterr7​ for the very useful advice.

[henrykanke]

I have the same slowness on shared folders.  MacOS host, windows 7 on Fusion. No Sophos antivirus installed on MacOS.

My setup for the shared folders are my Dropbox folder. I have dropbox installed in MacOS, and in win 7, access dropbox via shared folder.

Most of time it works ok. However from time to time, the win 7 will slow down as hell, everything is slow! Reboot sometime help sometime doesn't. If I disable the shared folder, then win 7 will back to normal.

I am thinking of install Dropbox on both MacOS and Win 7 so there will be dropbox folders in each OS. In this case, no shared folder is needed, but it means all my 30GB of dropbox files will be in both MacOS and win 7 which makes 60GB disk space usage!

Anyone has good advice/suggestion?

[ColoradoMarmot]

I suspect you're having an interaction between the two daemons trying to access the shared folder.    If you stop the dropbox service, does performance improve?

[henrykanke]

Quit dropbox on MacOS, still same. (There is no dropbox installed in win 7).

[SRNoyes]

I want to express this as an issue needing addressed sooner than later. I wish I had 35 second build times given mine are (on a proper system with fast access or on Fusion's C: drive) 15 minutes. On VMWare Fusion with shared drives it is over 7 hours.

My workaround is to using a file sync allowing me to develop in OS X (I prefer Xcode - sue me) and have the files automatically Sync between the CM Workspace and the build drive on the C:

It would be great if I could eliminate the build folder and build out of my editing folder.

[ColoradoMarmot]

For software builds, the old workaround was to use a USB drive attached directly to the guest.  Dramatic performance improvements, but of course, you can't access from the host at the same time.

[kwaltman]

I was getting my Windows 8.1 VM to freeze and eventually crash every time I tried to browse to a shared folder that had 65,000+ images in it. What is odd is that this used to work before. I suspended my Avast Virus scanner, and now it works like a Dickenson Orphan. I think windows is scanning those files, perhaps to build it's thumbnail DB files, and the virus scanner interrupt lags that so much that on 65,000 + files it just brings the VM to its knees. I was seeing severe delays also when changing to any folder that has a lot of files in it. But once I turned off the virus scanner, it changes almost instantly now.

[wila]

Hi kwaltman,

Just to make sure.

While turning off the antivirus is a good way to pinpoint what is triggering this, it is best to exclude the shared folders from your antivirus product.

Most -if not all- antivirus products have a way to exclude paths from being scanned.

If it doesn't scan that path, the problem is gone and you are still protected.

If you are running antivirus at your host level as well, then it doesn't even change the protection land scape as the host already protects your shared folders.

--

Wil

[RusIsh]

Exactly the same problem here.

I have OSX High Sierra 10.13.4 (17E199) host OS and Windows 10 Pro 1709 (16299.403) guest OS.

I have a shared folder with a large number of files where I need to search for and edit files quite often. It takes anywhere between 30 seconds to a minute to find a file and then about 30 seconds to open it. Even trying to select a file (i.e. single click on it) could take about 15-20 seconds.

I have exactly the same setup with Parallels, where it takes about 20 seconds to find a file and about 5 seconds to open it. Single clicking a file is instantaneous.

Quite often in Fusion it takes me more time to find and open a file than to actually edit it. This is ridiculous, especially knowing that Parallels can do it 5 times faster.

[RusIsh]

Can anybody experiencing this problem confirm the following solution:

Expose the VM to the base network by selecting the physical LAN adapter in the "Bridged Networking" sections in "Network Adapter" settings. Map network resource as a mapped drive in Guest OS. Try and perform some operations on the newly mapped drive.

For me it did speed up things considerably.

[geneg1]

Just did a little testing on my own C++ project in Visual Studio 2013 running on VMWare Fusion 10.0.1, macOS 10.13.15, guest OS Windows 10 x64 Pro

1. Full project rebuild with source files local to the guest OS: 219 seconds

2. Full project rebuild with source files on host OS, connected via Windows file sharing (SMB), using bridged networking: 355 seconds

3. Full project rebuild with source files on host OS, connected via Windows file sharing (SMB), using NAT networking: 2257 seconds (not a typo)

4. Full project rebuild with source files on host OS, connected via VMWare Shared Folders (HGFS), using NAT networking: 2168 seconds

So @Ruslsh is definitely on to something. Bridged networking vs. NAT made a huge difference, at least for me. Still 40% slower than keeping the source files on the guest OS though.

Just for kicks I tried turning Windows Defender off on test #2 and the result was 342 seconds. A measurable but not huge savings. I'm not running any other AV software on the host or guest.

I haven't tried Parallels so I'm not sure if it would be any better.

[JHK4]

I had the same problem with file access taking so long I couldn't get any work done. I use both Windows XP and 7.

I say "had" because I switched to Parallels a couple years ago and file access for files on my host is as fast as if they were inside the windows vm.

That being said, I prefer vmware to parallels and am wondering if any of you with the problem find it is solved in version 11.

[dland2000]

steve goddard I appreciate the honest (and gutsy) reply. It may not be what everyone wants to hear but at least it's useful knowledge we can use to make decisions.

[rayr007]

steve goddard Any update on this? I find it unbelievable that it's been this many years with no improvements.

[Cintos]

OK, Longtime VMware (originally EMC) tech and proponent in enterprise. I have been using Fusion for personal use for over a decade. Application is geological work with GIS, which has needs for Win applications. As the datasets get bigger I began to lament on load times from my Mac application footprint into the Windows realm and back.  I discovered if I copied to a UBS drive, I could mount directly into Windows and the speed for small data files (the majority to the work) was several times faster.  As I looked into this topic it has become clear I must abandon Fusion for Parallels. 

Comparison: loading 2225 files (5.2 GB) using Parallels took 1 min 28 sec.  VMware 11 took 1 hour and 23 min.  Yes, that is min on Parallels and hours on VMware. I read here that the filesystem used for sharing is the culprit.

Sold.

Kind regards,

Michael