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Doc69
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Fusion 6 extremely slow on Mavericks

I am running Fusion 5 on 10.8 and it works great. Now I want to upgrade my 2010 Mac Pro to Mavericks and Fusion 6. However, a friend of mine is running Fusion 6 with a Win XP VM on Mavericks and he says it's almost unusable. The WM now takes about 5 minutes to boot, and everything is then extremely slow. However, he is using this combo on a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM from 2007. Could this be the reason why it's so slow? But he says everything worked perfectly before upgrading to Mavericks.

Could I have the same experience on my Mac Pro? Is anyone running Win XP and Win 7 in Fusion 6 on Mavericks with same or better speed as on 10.8?

7 Replies
mtairs
Contributor
Contributor

experiencing same problems running Win7 on my MacBook Pro.  Not happy after paying our for the VMWare upgrade and now renders my entire system unusable when the VM is open (again after 5 minutes!).

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Coach300
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Just want to ask if you have checked out other threads in this forum. Mavericks has some core technologies that, while designed to conserve battery life, will lump processor activity rather than allow apps to just run on their own. "App Nap" is the one that can (theoretically) be turned off on an app-by-app basis (the setting is in the Finder's Get Info/command-I for the application icon) and I recommend that.

Fusion 6 is optimized for Windows 8, Mavericks, AND the newer Haswell processors (and I can say that I can simultaneously start up two different VMs--both Vista and 7) and not lose pace on Mavericks on a brand new MacBook Pro that's almost a week old). Without Haswell, we're seeing people having to go without some key features they like, such as shared folders, bridged networking, and others, to make things work sufficiently well. If you have a good system in your Mountain Lion/Fusion 5 setup, there's really no good reason to change any of that until you go to a Haswell or newer Mac.

Camponuevo
Contributor
Contributor

After doing a lot of research and almost getting crazy finally I got a solution.

I'm running VM 6.0.2 on Mavericks 10.9.1 as host and a virtual with Mavericks 10.9.1

I added this into .vmx file

MemTrimRate = "0"

sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"

I noticed is I/O issue, extremely slow (to do anything) but specially to empty trash o build java war projects >200Mb

More details in VMware KB: Troubleshooting Fusion virtual machine performance for disk issues

Hope this helps

Cadu.

RupertKemp
Contributor
Contributor

Just wanted to add that I was having the same problem until I did what both Coach300 and Camponuevo suggested in their reply posts. That seems to have solved the issue for me. Thanks

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WilGeno
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Another possible solution is to do what I did. I bought iDefrag and VMOptimizer and ran those on my system and VM. That solved all the slowness issues I was seeing. Before my virtual CPU was maxed out and now I can run all my development apps and MS SQL Server on my Win7 VM without any issues just like I was doing before upgrading to Mavericks and VMWare Fusion 6.x.x.

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lucoweb
Contributor
Contributor

Cadu, your answer worked for me. THANK YOU!!!

renatob
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thank you, Cadu. Works very well. No more problems here!

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