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Thorarin
Contributor
Contributor

Workstation 15.5.5 performance hit

Just a couple of hours ago, I've updated from 15.5.1 (?) to version 15.5.5 of Workstation Pro.

I've been exited about this update, especially being able to use WSL2 on my developer system is a plus.

However, immediately after updating, I noticed a quite dramatic performance hit.

My mouse cursor doesn't even move fluently anymore, it hangs and stutters a lot.

I haven't installed Hyper-V related services yet.

Anyone else experiencing this?

System summary:

i9-10940X, 64GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070.

Running Windows 10 1909 still.

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68 Replies
Mits2020
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I was intrigued by your exotic CPU so I looked up Intel downloads for it here Downloads for Intel® Core™ i9-10940X X-series Processor (19.25M Cache, 3.30 GHz)  and saw a bunch of performance-enhancing utilities. Do you have them all installed? This may be helpful information for any VMware gurus willing to help.

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bkraul78
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I too have experienced several odd performance issues with 15.5.5. I am running with Hyper-V related services on. I also have VirtualBox vms and they are operating without issue. I ended up having to go to the VMWare settings and allocate memory instead of "allowing some memory to be swapped", and that seemed to help.

However, I am experiencing this weird mouse capturing issue, where sometimes the buttons on windows on my VMs will not perform the click operation. I know it is a capture issue, because if I go to another vm tab, and then come back to the affected vm, the clicking works again. I wonder if it is something that can easily be remedied. I have updated VMWare Tools on all my Windows guests.

System Summary:

Alienware 15 R3 with 32GB RAM, Core i7-6820HK @ 2.7GHz, nVidia GTX 2070.

Running Windows 10 2004

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3djc
Contributor
Contributor

Expriencing this also, and badly

System summary

i9-7900X, 32GB RAM, , GTX1080 Titam

I use this VM for large project compilation in a linux guest. My  heavily threaded compilation is extremely slow, where the windows performance manager was getting a 100% cpu usage when running previously, I now get 10% with hyper-v... unusable.

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edwardchenchen
Contributor
Contributor

I am experiencing the same issue.

Win 10 Pro 2004

VMware workstation 15.5.5

Docker Desktop with WSL2

17-8700K, 32G, 2060Super

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hahakiki2010
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Thanks for reporting this issue to us. Could u try following methods and see if any improvement for the performance ?

1) Disable 3D accelerate in VM setting and see if the mouse issue still persist

2) Increase the CPU thread in VM setting

3) Increase the VM memory to 4G and set the graphic memory to 2G

4) Shutdown all other VMs and keep one vm running on the host.

If above methods all don't work, please send us the vmware.log and vm-supported data (Help->Support->Collect Support data) to investigate. You can upload the logs to below ftp site and let me know the folder name. Thanks

VMware ftp site:

FTP Server: ftpsite.vmware.com

User:   inbound

Pwd:    inbound

Port:   21

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Tom_123
Contributor
Contributor

that doesnt seem to be working for me,

i'm still unable to perform the click operations in some parts of the vm - frustrating when will vmware work on this?

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Thorarin
Contributor
Contributor

hahakiki2010

1) Disabling 3D acceleration does prevent the mouse cursor from stuttering. Graphically everything else feels slower, of course.

2) The VM already had 6 CPU cores allocated to it. I'm assuming that should be enough?

3) The VM already had 16GB allocated RAM. Increasing from 1 to 2GB Graphics memory has no effect.

4) I was only running a single VM to begin with.

Additional note:

I noticed that the mouse cursor stuttering only happens in full screen mode, but that may not be helpful or surprising. I'm relatively new to VMWare Workstation.

I'll try to gather some logs soon.

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hahakiki2010
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Many thanks for your feedback.

To upload the logs, please enable the debug level in the logging by (VM setting -> Options -> Advanced -> Gather debugging information -> Set the value to Full) and upload the vmware.log in the VM folder and supported data.

One more question, how do you connect to the VM? Is it connected by RDP or VNC?

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Secant1006
Contributor
Contributor

This performance problem occurs when VMware Workstation is using Windows Hypervisor Platform as virtualization platform. It existed back in the VMware Workstation 20H1 Technology Preview earlier this year. If you enable Hyper-V, WSL2, Credential Guard or Windows SandBox, then VMware will automatically use Windows Hypervisor Platform. You can verify this by using bcdedit command, which will list your system boot option under {current} section and tell you whether Hyper-V core is enabled (hypervisorlaunchtype=auto means enabled).

But I've noticed that using UEFI firmware for the virtual machine partly solves the issue. The performance downgrade is minor but still noticeable, though acceptable. For testing I tried installing Windows 10 v2004 using the same installation file and the same virtual machine configuration but one with BIOS firmware and the other with UEFI firmware. The speed when using BIOS firmware was EXTREMELY slow which literally made the VM unusable, while using UEFI firmware gave me a reasonable speed.

I tried Hyper-V and VirtualBox using WHP with BIOS firmware but both of them resulted in normal speed, therefore, I assume that it's a problem on the VMware side.

When creating a virtual machine, the default setting of firmware type is UEFI for Windows 10 and BIOS for older Windows and Linux, etc. If you want to switch firmware type, you can go to VM Settings -> Options -> Advanced -> Firmware Type. Note that switching firmware type may cause your existing VM OS installation unbootable. You need some additional steps to create an EFI boot partition and copy / install boot files to it, or to perform a complete re-installation.

I'm using an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2500U processor and integrated Radeon Vega 8 graphics on Windows 10 v2004 (19041.264). It's so different from others' hardware configurations above that this problem definitely has nothing to do with CPU or something.

bkraul78
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have found the issue below is an open issue. I suspect it may be related to the performance issues in VMWare Workstation 15.5.5. I noticed my system as a whole was extremely sluggish. I found a process called vmmem eating up most of my RAM. I read up on it and it turn out it is the memory manager for WSL2. Memory on WSL machines is "supposed" to be automatically freed periodically, but there seems to be an open bug on this here:

WSL 2 consumes massive amounts of RAM and doesn't return it · Issue #4166 · microsoft/WSL · GitHub

I applied the .wslconfig workaround in there, and found the WSL memory usage contained to what I specified. My system (and hopefully VMWare Workstation) appears much more stable. I will be testing this today and hopefully report back. Also hoping the long-term fix will be applied by Microsoft.

UPDATE: Doing the workaround, I do see the WSL has decreased to the limit I set, but my VWare performance has actually gotten worse. I suspect that VMWare now relies on the WSL2 memory allocation, tho I have no proof of that.

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nicolafarina
Contributor
Contributor

Same here on a brand new Windows 10 2004 host (with no Hyper-v components).

VMs with enabled 3D acceleration causing host's GPU peak at 75-100% causing general system enormous lag.

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Susie201110141
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi ,

Thanks for doing many investigation for this issue.

I setup a BIOS firmware Win10 2004 VM in HyperV env, and no obvious performance decrease. So I need your help to reproduce this issue for more investigation.

Could you tell me what kinds of operations you did after booting up the VM to evaluate the performance ?

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bkraul78
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Susie201110141​, for me, I have a WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 distro running. I also have Docker Desktop, which uses that Ubuntu distro for me to run containers. I have 3 VMs I use all the time. One runs Server 2019 with SQL Server 2012 Std, And then a couple of Windows 10 2004 machines. One runs legacy applications written in MS Access, and the other one is a VisualStudio 2019 development environment.

The thing is, the poor performance is noticeable even before opening the apps, simple things like opening a Windows Explorer window, double-clicking on a folder to open it. Sometimes the actions are delayed, menus take a few seconds to come up.

Prior to running the 15.5.5 update, I ran my VMWare setup with the "Allow some memory to be swapped". After the update, that became impossible, to the point of machines pretty much freezing. So I turned to "use all available memory up to X". And it ran a "bit" better, but not with WSL2 distro running. My poor old Alienware 15 R3 is on full fan on all the time now, and that was not the case prior.

I have already done much work moving from using a vm for my linux development to use WSL2 because of the versatility, but if I can't figure out a way to get the performance going things are going to look like a painful downgrade (pre-15.5.5, back to WSL1) will be in order.

I hope this is helpful.

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hahakiki2010
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

@bkraul78 Unfortunately we couldn't reproduce this issue in-house.  if possible, could u help collect some logs for us ? And we'll send it to developer to have a look.

Please noted to enable the debugging logging, you can change the log level by VM setting -> Options -> Advanced -> Gather debugging information -> Set the value to Full.

And upload the vmware.log and statistic folder to us. Many thanks for your help

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hahakiki2010
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Thorarin

Thanks for your effort on the investigation.  I have couple of questions about your test environment.

  1. HOST information,  like CPU type/Memory/Host OS version/Hyper-V status/new installation or upgrade/UEFI or BIOS/WSL status
  2. Guest information(OS type/OS version/new installation or upgrade/UEFI or BIOS/Disk type)
  3. VMware.log and vm-supported data
  4. Describe what you did when the issue happened

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bkraul78
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

@hahakiki2010

@Susie201110141

Below is information regarding my environment.

1. HOST Information:

Model: Alienware 15 R3

Processor/MB: Intel Core i7-6820HQ (Skylake-H) @ 2.7GHz

Memory: 32GB DDR4 RAM

Storage: 1TB SSD OS drive, 1TB SSD Data drive (vm storage)

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 530 w/discreet graphics: nVidia GeForce GTX 2070 8GB

Hyper-V Status: ON

OS: Windows 10 2004 (Upgrade from 1909) UEFI

WSL: WSL2 ON with Ubuntu 20.04 distro (WSL2 enabled) as default.

Additional Environment Specs: Docker Desktop w/WSL2 support enabled.

2. Guest information:

OS: Windows 10 2004 (Upgrade from 1909) BIOS

Disk type: 100GB Default SCSI, persistant, split-file.

RAM: 8GB

vCPUs: 8 total (1 processor / 8 cores per)

3. Please download: https://nextcloud.belmankraul.com/s/T2DR7MLnxGwBycB

4. I have attached two separate use scenarios found in their respective folders. The first one is with the "Allow some virtual machine memory to be swapped" memory option. Prior to 15.5.5 this was my default use mode, and I had absolutely no performance issues. However, with this version, the vm is virtually unusable, with most of the OS unresponsive. Simple things like clicking on a folder or basic window drawing events freeze or take a long time.

The second scenario is with using "Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM". With this, the performance is minimally better but there are still heavy issues which make it hard to carry out regular development tasks.

I could not find any folders with statistics or vm-supported data.

Please do let me know when you have downloaded the file so I can expire the share link.

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bkraul78
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Reverted all environment settings:

- Moved all docker containers and data (currently stored on WSL2 distro) to a newly created vm.

- Uninstalled Docker Desktop

- Converted WSL linux distros back to WSL1.

- Disabled WSL2 support at host level.

- Restarted host.

- Using VMWare 15.5.5 with "Allow some memory to be swapped" (like it originally was).

Performance is back to expected levels. Guess will keep hoping this gets addressed. I know it is not just vmware. As mentioned before on this thread, there are a couple of serious issues with WSL2 itself that Microsoft hasn't quite got the handle on just yet.

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hahakiki2010
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Secant1006

I can not reproduce this performance issue with BIOS firmware. I newly create a  win10 2004 VM with custom install where the firmware I select BIOS, however no performance issue is hit after VM power on. I tested windows explore, and play a video in YouTube, and toggle full screen on and off, everything looks smoothly.

My host is win10 2004 19041.264, GPU is  Nvidia 2080Ti, and CPU is  Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3600 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s).  Only Hyperv is enabled and running on the host

Some CU said if disable WSL2 or rollback it to WSL1, can resolve this performance issue. So If you have WSL2 enabled on the host, could u have a try?  Thanks

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Thorarin
Contributor
Contributor

Well, this thread ended up being hijacked by different issues, but this is not what is going on. I haven't enabled any of the Hyper-V related features, as I mentioned in my original post.

If I had those features enabled, I wouldn't have been able to run older versions of VMWare Workstation.

I was already using UEFI, so no help there either unfortunately.

I find the performance hit not at all acceptable. It's extremely irritating if you're moving your mouse and nothing happens; it messes with eye-hand-coordination.

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