100% CPU usage OS X 10.9, VMware Fusion 6.02, Win7 Pro

[WilGeno]

I'm having a massive issue with CPU usage running VMWare 6.02 on OS X Mavericks 10.9.  This is an 3.2 GHz Intel Core i3 with 16Gb of RAM. I've been running a Win7Pro instance on VMWare with very few issues until upgrading to OS X 10.9. The VM is set for 2 CPU's and 6Gb or RAM with about a 100Gb space allocation. The VM image is set to split up the image into smaller files.

After upgrading to Mavericks ALL actions take an extremely long time in Windows. Even boot up takes about 15 minutes or longer. From the exact moment that I click 'Start up' for the VM my host CPU usage spikes to 100% and stays there. This is an unusable situation.

Tried these things:

• Reinstalling VMware tools
• Shutting off unneeded services one at a time
• Reclaiming Disk space
• Rebooting the host
• Changed Cpu allocation to just 1 CPU
• Went through these forums looking for help.

Each and every time my host CPU spikes to 100% the exact moment I click 'Start' in VMware. So this is even before the Windows OS starts to boot up.

[WilGeno]

Even the Guest CPU is maxed at 100% once boot up is complete. This is not normal. Usually when I boot up Windows there is very little CPU usage.

[WilGeno]

So I grabbed a backup copy of my VM Image from long before I upgraded to Mavericks or VMware Fusion 6. Same results. 100% CPU usage on the host. VM takes 15 plus minutes to start up.

[mnahum]

I've the same issue here:

host : Mavericks

Guest: Windows 8 Enterprise

Hardware: MacBook Pro Retina + 2 external full HD screens connected

it's totally unusable and I'll downgrade to 6.01

[ClintConklin]

Same issue here with Fusion 6.02, Mavericks host and WIndows 7 Pro guest. Floors the cpu and leaves the machine essentially unusable for 15 - 20 minutes or so.

[dcsoft]

Perhaps this is related to App Nap core function in OS X Mavericks.  Disabling App Nap for "VMWare Fusion.app" has helped several of us over there.

[WilGeno]

I've tried that already. No help.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I believe a core i3 only has 2 cores in it (virtual cores don't count).  If so, drop back to a single core - you're starving the host.

Other things that cause this are Windows System restore (disable it), and antivirus scanning (auto protect is ok, the scanning isn't).

[WilGeno]

mkay, you did read my post in which I stated I did change to using just one CPU and that didn't help?

You did also read that the CPU spike starts the exact same moment that I click on "Start' to start the VM instance running, THUS this means that the CPU issues start BEFORE Windows is even running thus things such as Anti-Virus scanning, Windows System Restore and ANY OTHER FREAKING WINDOWS service that runs AFTER Windows is started IN NOT THE CAUSE HERE! 

Does anybody ever read AND comprehend?

[ColoradoMarmot]

There's a lot of posts in this thread, and not everyone may have tried every change, and because there may be multiple components to the issue (one post noted that the spike continues after windows has booted), it's worth checking them all.

So three more thoughts: 

Have you tried creating a clean VM from scratch to see if it's specific to this one (and it's backups), rather than a new one?  This is particularly important if the VM in question was converted from a physical machine.

Have you checked your hard drive to see if it's starting to fail?  Disk utility is inadequate for that - you'll need something like Smart Utility (free trial - Voltain's software).

If you run antivirus on the host, have you excluded the virtual machine from what it monitors/watches/scans?

[philippem]

I have been experiencing this with VMWare Fusion Professional Version 6.0.2 (1398658) running on OSX 10.9 mid 2009 nehalem mac pro.

I've seen it happen with a Windows Server 2012 VM running on SSD and on Windows Server 2008 R2 vms running on mechanical drives.

[ngeron]

I encountered this issue on fusion 5.0.4 in December shortly after upgrading to Mavericks.  Before I found this post, I purchased the upgrade to 6 thinking there might be a fix there.

I've played with a process explorer, specifically the old sysinternals procexp.exe and on my system its definitely not any secondary program.  Its quite clear that the ntoskrnl.exe (NT Kernel) is hogging my CPU.  I found a VMware KB article (escapes me know, but google is your friend) indicating that high kernel usage inside a VM could be related to incorrect HAL settings or multiproc set on a single vproc VM.  I think someone mentioned that earlier in this thread.  That didn't turn out to be my issue, so I was hoping my upgrade would solve it.  Boo.

If others are still experiencing this issue, I would be very curious to hear if you can confirm the issue I'm seeing.  Sysinternals was purchased by Microsoft years ago and is still available on Microsoft's site as a free download.  All you have to do is unpack the zip and run the process explorer.  If 'System' is the process listed with the spiky CPU usage, you can bring up the properties on it, go to the 'threads' tab and see a real-time read out of the current thread causing the issue.  Even if others don't see the same thing I do, you could use that to find out if it is something like anti-virus or some other early launched app causing a problem.

Hope that helps someone and again, please let respond if you can confirm the issue.  It should help if I/we have to work up the phone support channels.

[philippem]

In the System Idle Process:0 Properties, I have two rows one for each Processor, and in each row there is a thread called ntoskrnl.exe!KiCpuID+0x6a0 running each taking approximately 50% cpu.

Is that normal?

[ibradbury]

Very similar issue for me using VMWare Fusion 6.0.2 (1398658) under OS X Mavericks 10.9.1. Every VM I launch immediately spikes 1 core and the VM is sluggish to the point of being frozen.

This is on my work machine. I use Fusion on a daily basis. Performance was excellent up until a few days ago. Very strange.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Try disabling system restore, and make sure that antivirus scanning is turned off (temporarily).

[mnahum]

Just to remind the 2 tips I've:

1°/close Google Chrome who is 90% of the time responsible of the issue (still don't know why and why its not fixed)

2°/ unplug the power ... (look stupid but it works)

I would really want to have somebody from support taking care of it but its move nowhere ... I'll soon have a recent MacBook Pro Retina 15, and I hope that the issue will be fixed by the new hardware ...

[ajjantz]

I've been dealing with the same issue ever since I upgraded to OSX Maverick; I have a late 2009 MacMini running 8Gb of RAM with two hard-drives. After reading and researching for several hours, days, weeks, I think I'm finally making progress. I tried everything I could find, i.e. disabling App Nap, disabling Windows Updates, tweaking memory and number of processors, will no changes. My Windows 7 Pro VM would run for a few minutes then freeze and if it ran longer, as soon as the screensaver would come one, it'd freeze. The last two things I did which seem to have "fixed" things temporarily is to disable 3D Acceleration and to install Sysinternals and run procexp.exe. I discovered a program called wmpnetwk.exe was using 50 to 80% almost constantly. The file is part of the Windows Media Player package, so since I already have another media player, I permanently disabled the service. Now my Windows 7 Pro VM runs again... most of the times. Just started getting "Cannot find a peer process to connect to", so that'll be the next issue to work on.

[philippem]

some more data points.

1. In my VMs, I have no anti-virus running.

2. A Windows Server 2008 R2 VM that I copied from Windows VMWare Workstation 9.0 runs very slow on VMWare Fusion 6.

3. A Windows Server 2008 R2 VM that I created from scratch on VMWare Fusion 6 with the same configuration as (2) above runs normally.

[tjsoftworks]

Phillip Pem----

When you say in number 3 that the configuration is the "same" what do you mean by this? The VM resources are the same or that you have copied something internal to the guest so that internal the guest OS is configured the same..... There are more possible "with the same configuration" interpretations. I'm not sure which ones to think about so please send a bit more detail...

Thanx

[WilGeno]

So far the only thing that appears to have worked was buying iDefrag and defragging my host file system. It's been two days and so far I have not had any more issues. The same company also sells VM Optimizer that I have not used.