Fusion 7 is running VERY SLOW on the GM of Yosemite

[Stevamundo]

Basically Fusion 7 is unusable on the GM of Yosemite because fusion 7 is so slow.

When I was still on Mavericks 10.9.5  Fusion 7 was working just great. What happened?

Is anyway that i can fix this? Or do I have to wait for an update?

[swcruiser]

Im having the same issue.  I upgraded to Yosemite on iMac 2011 running 6.0.5 VM and windows 8.1 Pro.  Seemed to run fine and then on shutdown and power up the system lags.... like crazy.  I upgraded to 7.0 and the system is actually running worse....   moving the cursor over the VM window seems to speed things up but computer is not useable at all.  I have a 2014 Macbook pro that is running the same VM setup and this machine is running without any issue. I have also tried this on another iMac with same vintage and has the same exact issues..  We need this fixed.

[renegad3]

here ya go

[pprem]

same problem for me with Yosemite and Fusion 6.0.5 on an Intel Core i5 (mi-2011 iMac)

but my VM on an Intel Core i7 is working good (GM3 + Fusion 6.0.5) (mi-2012 Mac Book Pro Retina)

I think there is a problem using CPU core or sharing memory when the system doesn't have enough (8Gb on each, but my second computer have a SSD et perhaps it's working better because of swap is more speed)

I launched a performance debug, but don't know where are the log.

when Fusion in up, with a VM, the Mac is slower but still work, the Windows VM (XP or 8.1) have 100% CPU, McAfee is on top on each

[dariusd]

Thanks for that.  Just to double-check: If you go into the guest's Task Manager (or Activity Monitor or System Monitor or top), does it show any noteworthy activity there, or does the guest think there is nothing running?

--

Darius

[renegad3]

here is the guest pretty much with nothing running, the drop in memory is when I closed chrome.

-vmx in activity monitor did settle a bit, but still ranged anywhere from 50 to 85%,

in Mavericks, it was very rare for it to ever go over about 15% with exact same VM/usage

[lordboogie · Accepted solution]

Same thing here... registered just to comment on this issue.

I'm experiencing the same issues of poor performance, 1 CPU core usage on and off with VMware Fusion 7 as well as Parallels Desktop 9 exhibits the same behavior.  The issue is random, because sometimes I'll fire up a VM in either app and it will work normally, others it's one CPU being used, and the VM is extremely sluggish - especially if you don't keep the window in the foreground.

This issue seems isolated to the 2011 iMac and Yosemite final.  I had experienced this same behavior in one of the earlier public betas of Yosemite as well, so it certain feels like an Apple-side issue and not one that on VMware.

Edit... Apparantly this issue may be related to the NVRAM preferences of these particular macs, and they say running sudo nvram boot-args="debug=0xd4e" should fix the issue.

See this link for original information: http://forum.parallels.com/threads/parallels-10-running-slow-on-yosemite.326205/

[renegad3]

Thank you for that, it has made a WORLD of difference for mine.

Actually running at a little less avg. cpu usage than it was on mavericks.

My CPU and my sanity thank you!!!

[dariusd]

That is truly bizarre.  Well spotted, lordboogie!  (And welcome to the VMware Communities!  May all your posts be as awesome as your first! :smileygrin:)

renegad3 (or others with this same problem), do you have the opportunity/time/motivation to help narrow this problem down a little more?  If that nvram variable really fixes the issue, it suggests a super weird bug somewhere in the OS X kernel, so it'd probably be worthwhile trying to find the root cause and let Apple know.

If you have the chance, it'd be superb if you could try with debug=0xd00 or debug=0x040 or debug=0x00e and see if any (or all) of those have the same effect.  Setting debug=0xd4e changes a lot of subtle behaviors of the system, but they should all be totally unrelated to the problem we are seeing here!  I'm perplexed, and will remain so until this is explained...

Cheers,

--

Darius

[renegad3]

Absolutely.

I will have to do this tomorrow.

All I can say is, its running even better now than when I was using Fusion 7 on Mavericks. Obviously its been a short time, but so far its very promising.

I will do some testing tomorrow and report back.

[dhimic]

@lordboogie

All I can say is thank you!!   Not a computer expert, but following your post made my Windows 7 PC responsive again!!!!  It finally boots and is useable, now I have to work all night to make my Monday AM deadline.  Thanks again, don;t know what the setting is but it fixed my problems!

[Stevamundo]

Here's mine activity monitor. Yeah my vmware-vmx is at 100%.

[Stevamundo]

Yeah, mine is running for at least a half hour now and it's still running.

[wickedstealthy]

Some observations.

Left the sample process running for the rest of the night. Still running ... so I stopped it.

However, what seemed to happend is that my VM has settled for some very funny reason and is responsive again. Pretty weird as I haven't done anything expect that my iMac went to sleep. After checking this morning it seems to perform ok.

CPU usage is down from +100% to a normal 5% when just idling.

I will try to retest this behaviour and check if the nvram options work.

[Stevamundo]

What's a spin dump?

BTW my iMac is a 2011 too.

I'm going to give up on the sample thing too. It just isn't doing anything except for showing a full blue line from the start.

[wickedstealthy]

Could someone test the following :

- Shutdown OSX

- Restart + open VMWARE Fusion (don't start your Guest)

- Manually sleep your Mac (wait till HAD spins down etc ...)

- Wake your Mac

- Start your Guest VM

It seems that I had already some improvement here. Not sure though if bringing my Mac to sleep before starting my Guest VM was really much of an improvement. Looks like it but haven't had enough time to test it before going to work.

Next

- After booting my Guest VM I brought my MAC back to sleep again. Waited till the disks stop spinning and woke it. This last step seemed to improve performance dramatically. CPU load went down to max 15% when idling. Starting a browser in my VM and it was snappy.

Especially this last step seemed to trigger something.

[Stevamundo]

This worked for me as well.

Thanks!

[richwilkes]

Those steps restored normal behavior for me... at least for this session. Note that I did not apply the nvram change that was suggested elsewhere.

[wickedstealthy]

Thx for confirming this behaviour. It is certainly not a permanent fix but it gives maybe a clue for the people of VMWare where to look.

I would think there is an issue with the video driver or GPU power management.

[gringley]

The debug command worked!  I just wish I knew what I just did to my iMac!?  I have used registers in Cisco for many years, but could not equate this debug command to the documentation I found via Google?

[HPReg]

Good news. We have been able to reproduce the issue in-house. So far everybody who reported the issue mentioned a mid-2011 iMac. It turns out there are 2 iMac models in that category (see iMac (Intel-based) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 😞 iMac12,1 and iMac12,2. Can everybody who is affected by this issue report their exact Mac model using this command in Terminal:

   sysctl hw.model

Thanks!