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Luminatio
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VM became extremely slow after upgraded to macOS 10.14.6 [Officially Solved]

------------20190827--------------------------

This issue is officially solved with Apple’s macOS 10.14.6 supplemental update.

Thanks to all of you.

A thumb down to Apple’s software team...

————————

After I upgraded my 2 MBP to 10.14.6, all of the Windows VMs became extremely slow and stuck at the login screen...

The VMs are set to use TPM, I don't know if it's relevant.

Anyone came across the same situation?

Now I cannot continue my work...really frustrating...

—————20190727————-

I’m updating this for convenient reference.

Status: This issue has not been solved yet.

Many users encountered this issue which leads to completely unusable of VMs.

And we got some replies from Fusion developers, you could help developers identify issues by replying your hardware models/is disk encrypted or have the VM encrypted etc.

We have some reports that some users found out that if set the memory of VM to 2G could help.

Re: VM became extremely slow after upgraded to macOS 10.14.6

If you don’t need to use much memory and can work with it, you might try set the memory to 2G, or maybe less than 4G is also okay?

Still we are waiting for an official solution.

------------20190809--------------------------

Thanks to ksc

Re: VM became extremely slow after upgraded to macOS 10.14.6

I updated to Fusion 11.1.1, confirmed that I can login to the system, and desktop shows normally.

As ksc says, it is a workaround which I'm not quite sure if I can trust it to do my work in it....

At least, I'm able to get my works out and change to other options now.

I'll mark this issue as resolved for now, but keep the [Workaround Released] tag in the subject.

Looks like it would take quite some time for a real fix, I'll keep an eye on this.

消息编辑者为:Liam

227 Replies
Zongmin
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Hi

You can either attach log to your post, or upload to the following FTP server:

FTP Server: ftpsite.vmware.com

User:   inbound

Pwd:    inbound

Port:   21

Suggest adding a string "10.14.6+ community  name" to the log name  so it could be easier to identify.

Really appreciate your help!

VMware Fusion Team

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Sven1802
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Hi,

I cannot unencrypt my VMWare image as I need to use TPM and this requires a encrypted VMware image.

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bolaz
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Yes, it works for me as well. I reduced from 4 to 2GB and I'm able to work.

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sfella1005
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Change your memory to 2gb.  I did that on my TPM encrypted VM and that solves the slowness.

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Sven1802
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Hi, I can confirm this. Limit the VMWare memory to 2GB and everything is working well again. But running a full featured W10 with just 2 GB could be just a workaround.

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ksc
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Official update after another day... we have a partial root cause, and some partial workarounds.

There is a significant behavioral change in MacOS's usage of pinned memory. Exact change in behavior is unknown, but the net effect is that we significantly underestimate the MacOS's memory needs. As a result, we don't back off memory pressure soon enough, and page-out times spike unusually high. We're still investigating exactly what changed so we can address it directly.

In the big picture, we expect to (potentially) use ~60-85% of the system's maximum memory for running VMs; that leaves enough memory for the system to function well. You can see our usage as "wired memory" in Activity Monitor (a MacOS tool) - starting a VM will significantly increase "wired" memory, and stopping a VM will release it back. An 8GB host running a 4GB VM would be expected to "wire" somewhat above 4GB. Well, something has changed, and now wiring that 4GB of memory is enough to put the system under memory stress ... profilers show we're spending all the CPU time trying to unwire memory. That slows down everything, which increases lock contention, which slows down everything more ... and nobody is happy with the results. (As noted before, encrypted VMs have extra cryptographic overhead during I/Os, which make them extra sensitive to slowdowns).

This does lead to two workarounds, the first discovered by others on this forum.

  1. Reduce individual VM memory size. Others have noted that dropping from a 4GB VM to a 2GB VM is enough to feel responsive.
  2. Reduce total VM memory usage. In the file "~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/preferences", add these two options:
    • prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemorySize = "FALSE"
    • prefvmx.allVMMemoryLimit = "4096"

          The first option enables the second. That second value is the maximum across all VMs, in MB. It can be set smaller than actual VM size.

Anyone familiar with VMware Workstation's UI may recognize those settings. They have never been present in the Fusion UI, because the automatic tuning has been very good. Until now.

The results aren't perfect; VMs still start to slow down after a while. But there is a significant improvement. And profiles consistently show a more limited memory size is reducing CPU saturation.

sfella1005
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I don't have the "preference" in the folder /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/

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ksc
VMware Employee
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I don't have the "preference" in the folder /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/

Leading ~ character, for home directory.

   ~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/preferences

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Wegener22
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Nice, thanks! This worked - for me.

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DaveP
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I found this worked but I did have to drop the VMs memory from 8GB to 6GB (16GB MacBook Pro 15" 2018). It has been running for several hours and running developer IDEs and compilers with no lockups so far.

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arjan77
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Thanks!

I can work now with 2GB RAM in VM (13" Macbook Pro 2018 with 16GB RAM) but with 4GB is still not possible and immediately 100% CPU after 1-2 minutes..

2GB is not much... I hope Apple will fix it soon... 😕

lightvin05
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Hi,

I have same issue. My VM, a Centos 7 guest os, is in usb ssd (fat32 because I share with Windows, and EXFAT is unstable) and after update it freezes at random intervals with spinning pinwheel.

I decided to free up some space (about 175Gb) on the internal disk and copy the VM from the usb disk to the internal disk. After that the VM work normally, is a little slow but work.

I think that, in my case, the problem is either in the USB connection or in the management of the fat32 filesystem.

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CallanB
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+1 for this issue, but it also impacts me running Fusion 8.5.10

My VM took approx. 30 minutes to resume from suspended today.

MBP 2014 16GB, no encryption

6GB Win10 VM, encrypted disk

While I don't except support on an old release, I thought it may be helpful to report.

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aykay123
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Since the update, not only my VM performance is worsened, I even had two host freezes now (the mouse pointer could still be moved, but the system no longer responded to any inputs). I'm not sure it is related to the issues discussed here either. However, when can we expect an update?

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gpalmerjr
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Same boat here!!  Completely unusable VM's.

VMWARE Fusion Version 11.1.0 (13668589)

MacOS Mojave 10.14.6 (18G84)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)

2.3 GHz Intel Core i5

16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3

Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB

VM's do have TPM and encrypted drives.  Mac also has encrypted drive.

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gebara
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In the meantime i tried every of the proposed solutions including your last ones:

- deleting snapshots

- cleaning up of the virtual machines

- doing all of the proposed vmware fusion and virtual machine configuration hacks, one by one, all together and even separately

I´m running a Windows 2016 Server instance with 8GB Ram and 256GB disk space on an encrypted 1TB SSD.

The VM does not use TPM and is not encrypted.

My machine is old:

Model Name:MacBook Pro
Model Identifier:MacBookPro11,3
Processor Name:Intel Core i7
Processor Speed:2,6 GHz
Number of Processors:1
Total Number of Cores:4
L2 Cache (per Core):256 KB
L3 Cache:6 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology:Enabled
Memory:16 GB
Boot ROM Version:156.0.0.0.0
SMC Version (system):2.19f12

I´m using the VM for development purposes (Visual Studio 2017) and it worked quite well up to last week - now i´m not able to start Visual studio and load even the smallest project within 10 minutes.

I´ve chosen the OSX/MacOS-VMWare combination over 10 years ago 'cause i´m earning my money with this equipment and i needed a reliable platform which was not based on windows.

Now it´s the SECOND time within one year that i've to build up a new VM because the Apple/VMWare-configuration is unexpectedly broken by an Apple update.

I´m not surprised by Apple - they left the professional area and turned to "hip handy consumers talking to Siri" in the past years, so one can not expect anything beside "funky touchbars" (specially when it`s done with software) - they think, being expensive is enough ....

BUT VMWare ???

How could this happen ???

Sincerely yours

Edmond

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ppatel1107
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I was told by VM Ware support rep to either roll back to 10.14.5 via time machine or decrypt the computer. Neither of which was an option available to me so I did the next thing that was available. Revert back to Mac High Sierra by factory resetting the MacBooks. I am not sure if this is an option available to all but this does resolve the issue with the VM.

*Backup the VMWare copy as well as any other things you need to an external location before you do this.s

I am now waiting for VMware to release a fix for this and will have to work using High Sierra until then as I definitely need VsWare to do the my job.

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prpsarathy
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just reduce ram to 2gb remove dedicated memory for video card and give one core to vm. it will work. it might not be fast but it is working.

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MorgothSauron
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I installed a new Windows 10 64-bit VM with 3Gb RAM, but without encryption and TPM. It feels a little bit sluggish but it's usable compared to the encrypted VM.

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thrubovc
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+1

Macbook Pro 2018, 12 core 2,6GHz i7, 16GB RAM, encrypted disk, running Mac OS 10.14.6 and VMWare 11.1.0

guest VM: Windows 10, 3 cores, 3,5GB RAM, encrypted, with TPM

too bad I found this thread too late, I've already removed the VM and tried reinstalling it since I thought I had corrupted the disk somehow. Unfortunately, it's my work laptop so I can't turn off the filevault or the TPM in the VM.

EDIT:

so the VM would hang up with 100% CPU only after logging in. while windows was idle (login screen), there was no lag. same goes for the installation process of a new VM. things got bad only after confirming to go further with installation.

tried lowering RAM to 2GB and lo and behold, installation is going through now. will set up the VM and monitor.

UPDATE:

I have set up the VM with all the software and config and it's running flawlessly. it's only 2GB RAM so it's a little laggy, but totally operational

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