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ITdojo
Contributor
Contributor

Fusion Pro 11 performance with MacOS Mojave Troubles

I have been a Fusion Pro user for many years.  I frequently run Debian or Ubuntu 64-bit guests on a MacOS host.  Sometimes I run just one VM at a time, other times I run a few.  Everything has been pretty great for the past few years ...until either MacOS Mojave or Fusion Pro 11 came along (or both).  Now I'm having a really tough time.

I currently have a 2018 MacBook Pro Core i9 with 32GB RAM, a 1TB SSD and Radeon Pro 560X.  I also have a 2012 iMac Core i7 with 32GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 680MX.  Both run MacOS Mojave (10.14)

My iMac (and previous MacBook Pro) had been running MacOS High Sierra and Fusion Pro 10 for the past few months without issue and my new MacBook only ran Fusion Pro 10 for a few days before Fusion Pro 11 came out.  It has been downhill ever since.

Both computers are now running MacOS Mojave with Fusion Pro 11 and my VMs are really hard to work with on both machines.  The guests behave otherwise normally unless I let them sit idle for several minutes and then I get the spinning beach ball when trying to interact with them again.  It takes anywhere from 30-40 seconds to a few minutes for the VMs to start responding to me again.

Most of the time it takes so long for them to respond that I end up force-quitting Fusion.  When I open it back up, the VMs are still running and are responsive again (which I find odd because they aren't resuming; they are just still there running)... until a I let them sit idle again and then it's back to beach ball time.

I have tinkered with the guest RAM and processor settings on several different VMs.  I have also tinkered with the sleep and automatic suspend settings on the guests.  All to no avail.  I have been running VMs like this for years with few to no problems and certainly nothing like this.

I have tried open-vm-tools and the VMWare Tools on different VMs to see if they offered any differences (uninstalling the other each time before switching).  They don't help.  In previous versions of Fusion I have been using open-vm-tools with great success but now it's buggy (I had to write a script to restart open-vm-tools at login in order to get the screen to resize when dragging by the corners).  VMWare Tools hasn't worked for me in a long time and when I tried it again with Fusion Pro 11 I met the same lack of success.  It installs fine but my screen won't resize and I can't get an actual full-screen mode to work (with VMWare Tools).

Is anyone else experiencing this slow performance with Fusion Pro 11 and MacOS Mojave combined?

If anyone has any suggestions on how I might fix the problem I'll be incredibly grateful.  The situation I've got now has me wondering if I need to try falling back to Fusion Pro 10 or High Sierra.  I really don't want to do that.

Thanks, in advance, for any help you can offer.

CW.

Message was edited by: ITdojo - corrected a typo.

60 Replies
AbortRetryFail
Contributor
Contributor

I've been having similar issues on a late 2013 iMac (16 GB, NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M) with 4 GB allocated to a Win7 VM since upgrading to Mojave/Fusion 11. Performance has been sluggish overall, and especially when trying to drag windows around or changing focus between applications/windows. There can be a 20 second lag between operations, and sometimes the operations simply fail to execute.

I turned off 3D Graphics and overall performance improved.

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MatoHP
Contributor
Contributor

I downgraded fusion to 10.1.3 (9472307). What do you know, there was an update out to Mojave too (though I think it's more security related to recent face time issues and others..).

I know I shouldn't change two things at the same time. But I went for it, I'm more-less convinced I need to downgrade osx anyway.  So I've updated Mojave to 10.14.1 (18B75).

I see some improvements now -- performance is definitely less terrible. Response time of those VMs is better, I could use them. But still, it's not the same as before. I'll update once I've reinstall osx.

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MatoHP
Contributor
Contributor

I downgraded osx back to 10.13.6 (17G3025), fusion 10.1.3 (9472307). It was somewhat better but something was still off (performance was not as before). I remembered that I did upgrade vmware tools already on some machines. I removed the tools from those guests and installed new ones (10.x one).

So far performance is night and day -- all guests are responding swiftly, the way they should. I'll update this thread later once those VMs have some uptime.

If somebody is out there who is still on Mojave but downgraded to fusion 10.x it might be worth trying to remove/install vmtools, just to see if that helps. Of course only if they were upgraded on fusion 11.x.

I didn't try to  disable Metal and enable back OpenGL as ITdojo suggested -- I was already set for downgrade.

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ITdojo
Contributor
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dlhotka​​, the MacBook Pro has the Radeon Pro 560x (4GB GDDR5 memory).

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ITdojo
Contributor
Contributor

MatoHP​, are you installing the VMWare vmtools or open-vm-tools-desktop from a repository (if running linux)?

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MatoHP
Contributor
Contributor

It was the worst with windows 7 guests. They got so unusable I had to kill them from cmd line. I had to uninstall them first because fusion 10.x refused to do a reinstall.

I use open-vm-tools where possible.   All my linux/freebsd/.. VMs are without X , there I didn't notice problems. But I didn't test too deep either -- I had to have windows7 clients back. But once windows VMs started to have problems so did osx.

I'm using these VMs for few hours now and so far so good, no problems.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

I wonder if that's the common thread here - a bad/rushed metal renderer in Mojave for the most recent chip?

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MatoHP
Contributor
Contributor

VMs are running for 24hrs now and no problem at all. So downgrade was the way to go.

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hanksterr7
Contributor
Contributor

I too am seeing the spinning beachball frequently when in my windows 10 guest, running on a new 2018 MBP, High Sierra. The beachball still moves when I move the mouse, but the guest is not responsive.

Ran the same guest on a 2013 MBP and had no issues

Haven't been able to figure out any pattern as to what triggers it, but once it starts, sometimes it clears on its own after a while. Other times seems to go on forever.

I run the guest in full screen mode. I've found that when the beachball starts, if I move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, so the Mac dock shows up, and launch Safari, and then immediately quit Safari and return to the guest, the beachball is gone, so that's my hack to get rid of the beachball (better than having to force-quit the guest)

Will try the changes to the graphics settings as mentioned

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_NM_
Contributor
Contributor

Very slow on my iMAC 4K Retina Late 2015 running Mojave 10.14.1 too. Windows task manager suggests the issue is disk access related that is at 98-100% during menial tasks when the system lags.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

So that sounds like something inside the VM.  Make sure you have antivirus scans turned off, and you can try disabling system restore as well.

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_NM_
Contributor
Contributor

That is not the issue.  Disk access is too slow.  It takes less than 2 MB/s to lock at 100%.  This is extremely poor performance for local disk access.

ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

So I'm confused, you're having the disk utilization spike inside the VM, but don't know what processes are causing it?   Or are you doing a performance test in the VM, and it's maxing out at that rate?

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jonahbenton
Contributor
Contributor

Bumping this. Also working with VMWare tech support to resolve a persistent beach ball issue, without success.

MBP Pro 15 - 2018

High Sierra

Fusion Pro 11

Multiple Fedora Linux VMs

I have had no problems with previous versions of Fusion, previous OS versions, on earlier hardware, going back about 10 years, running sometimes 5 or 6 VMs (always Fedora) at a time.

Now the beach ball predictably arrives if I leave the laptop alone for 10-15 minutes while running more than 1 VM. The problem does not occur running only 1 VM.

The beach ball will generally go away by itself, though it can take minutes, and the lifetime of the beach ball seems to track with the previous idle time. That is, if I leave the laptop alone for 10 minutes, I may get a beach ball for seconds. If I leave it for hours, the beach ball can last for 20-30 minutes. 

With the beach ball, the Mac and the VMs are responsive to mouse movements and clicks, though sometimes if the VMWare app is in the foreground, mouse control is lost, but it can be regained by using the force-quit keyboard combination to force another window to the Mac's foreground.

Keystrokes made in VM context are queued, not handled, until the beach ball goes away, but then when the beach ball goes away, the VM gets all the keystrokes.

I have additively put nearly every trick found through internet trolling in place without success-

* vmx enableGLRenderer

* allow VMWare to control

* disable sleep on the Mac

* disable app sleep on the Mac

* disallow hard disk sleep on the Mac

* disallow sleep in the VM

* pass power state into VM

* disallow use of 3d rendering by VMs

* etc

To my former Mac programmer eyes this is not rendering related- though I have had other stability/freeze issues, including with prior versions of Fusion, that disallowing 3d rendering has helped with- but instead is keyboard event handling related.

The fact that mouse events get handled and passed into the VM, and keyboard events do not- but get queued- and that the problem only occurs with more than VM running seems like it must be a race condition related to keyboard handling in the Fusion codebase.

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TimWarp
Contributor
Contributor

Are you still having your disk access issue? I have been noticing the same thing for months. I've tried many things, including a complete reinstall of Mojave, a clean install of Windows on a new VM, but nothing has helped. When I open Task Manager, it shows my Disk at 100% usually with only a total of ~2MB/s usage. It takes forever to do simple things now.

Mac specs:

2017 5k iMac, 4.2 GHz Core i7, 24GB RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8GB

VM specs:

4 processor cores, 12GB RAM, 3D graphics NOT accelerated, pre-allocated disk space.

My system worked fine with the previous macOS, came to a crawl with Mojave. I purchased the upgrade to Fusion 11 because it listed Mojave compatibility and performance improvements, but it makes no difference.

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jonahbenton
Contributor
Contributor

After a similar long history of success with VMWare and earlier Mac HW and OS, I have similarly had the beach ball problem with VMWare 11- but with High Sierra rather than Mohave.

After innumerable other configuration changes documented elsewhere on this thread, I have found that unchecking "Enable Mac OS Host Keyboard Shortcuts" in VMware Preferences -> Mac Host Shortcuts significantly reduces the impact of the beach ball.

Now I am able to continue to work in the VM operating system (Fedora Linux for me) even with the beach ball- the VM accepts keyboard and mouse events as per normal. With the beach ball I am only not able to switch back the host, until eventually- sometimes after tens of minutes- the beach ball goes away.

That's not great- changing that setting impacts my workflow, as I have key combinations to switch between VMs that no longer work- but overall the disruption is less impactful than having the beach ball completely prevent interaction with any VM until I force quit VMWare, then restart, then pick back up in the VM I was working in.

Someone seeing the beach ball with Mohave and VMWare 11, please see if changing that setting helps.

whoistheg76
Contributor
Contributor

I'm having the same issues as well.

Windows 10

and random beachballs for 30sec - 2 min

have to force quit Vmware all the time.

2018 MBP

i7, 512, 16gb RAM

10.14.2

its only happened over the past week.

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Treborw
Contributor
Contributor

Having similar issues. Fusion 11.0.2 is locking up my Windows 10 guest COLD - no beach ball, no busy in Windows, just click on the Windows guest window and the cursor locks and the only possible release is Ctrl-CMD to get cursor back in OSX. Once locked, the Windows session never comes back.

I have already turned off Accerated 3D graphics

I have allowed any item in System Preferences --> Security Privacy --> Privacy where VMWare Fusion.app is requested (i.e. Accessibility and Full Disk Access).

Mojave - 10.14.2

Fusion - 11.0.2

MacBook Pro 2018 core i7

1TB SSD / 16GB RAM

Only solution I have found at this point is to RESTART the VM. This is monstrously inconvenient as I lose document edits, strand web sessions and risk corrupting the VM.

Please advise which version of Fusion is the most stable with Mojave!!!!!!

HELP !!!!

Rob

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jonahbenton
Contributor
Contributor

With a linux guest, unchecking "Enable Mac OS Host Keyboard Shortcuts" in VMware Preferences -> Mac Host Shortcuts has meant that the freeze/beach ball for VMWare has not blocked me from getting work done in the guest. No idea if it will help with windows guest, though.

whoistheg76
Contributor
Contributor

ok,

So I took the advice and set all my keyboard shortcuts back to default and its been fine for 2 days.

I had a test ubuntu VM and it was defaulting to Netboot and I did not have a F2 key to get into the BIOS

so I setup a hotkey to press F2 Smiley Sad

Once I reset this last Friday it has been running fine ever since. Multiple wake from Sleeps and screensavers

Nice bug VMWARE !

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