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fgenest
Contributor
Contributor

XP guest slows down when moved to Quad / Vista 64 from XP host

The old host is a single core AMD Athlon 64 3500+ @ 2.21 GHz 2Gb RAM running XP pro 32 bits.

The new host is a Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz 6Gb RAM running Vista Home Premium 64 bits.

The virtual machine is running XP Pro 32 bits and the game Guild Wars, a not so recent multiplayer 3D game.

My question is why does the VM run so slowly when playing on the new computer when it is working very well on the old one? My first uneducated guess was that there is a performance cost to running a 32 bit guest on a 64 bit host. Now that I have searched a little bit, I get the impression that it is a synchronization problem due to the multiple cores. Is this a correct assessment? What can I do to monitor/improve performance?

edit: I have workstation installed on my linux box, the VMs are run by VMware Player 2.51 on both windows machines.

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fgenest
Contributor
Contributor

I would like to emphasize that the exact same XP 32 bits VM which runs smoothly on the old single core host has horrible response time on the new multi-core machine.

I have done the following experiment. I created a new VM with a Vista 64 bit guest, the same OS as the new host machine and I installed the same program that I was testing in the XP guest (Guild Wars) on this new VM. The result? The performance is as bad as with the XP guest. I conclude from this that the problem does not originate from having a 32 bit guest on a 64 bit host. I can see that the cpu usage of the Vista host is not very high even when running the test program so (I suppose) the problem really lies with the virtualization software.

I will refine and restate my questions.

1) Is the problem related to the fact that the Vista host has multiple cores?

2) If the answer is yes, is there some way of tuning Workstation to minimize the performance degradation due to multicore hosts?

3) Does some other VMware product offer a way to minimize this performance degradation?

I would really appreciate a response to these questions, be it a simple "read document so and so".

Thank you

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

The only thing you can do is to upgrade your host to XP , 2k3 or 2k8.

In my personal experience VMware performance of a Vista-host compared with XP or 2k3 on the same hardware at best reaches 50%

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fgenest
Contributor
Contributor

I'm still wondering what is the preponderant cause of the slowdown I'm experiencing. Is it

1) VMware products run poorly on Vista (compared to XP), or

2) VMware products run poorly on multicore systems (compared to single core systems)?

I am considering "upgrading" to XP but I'd appreciate hearing more points of view before I commit.

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fgenest
Contributor
Contributor

I'm still wondering why my 32 bit XP guest runs so much slower on my 64 Vista host compared to my 32 XP host.

Is this a known problem?

If so, does it have to do with the VMWare architecture as I suspect?

If so, are there concrete plans to address the problem or is it low priority?

As you can see, I'm still looking at this thread from time to time. If this has been answered in the meanwhile, please point out to me an appropriate post in the forums. Thank you.

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drummonds
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

The only lead I have for you is around Intel's SpeedStep technology. SpeedStep will increase/decrease the processor frequency based on guest load. A few months ago I discovered an issue in our hosted products where load inside a VM was not detected by SpeedStep, so the processor ran at very low frequencies. Check your BIOS and SpeedStep settings (if available) for "max performance" and see if this makes a difference.

Scott

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More information on my blog and on Twitter: http://vpivot.com http://twitter.com/drummonds
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