Fusion subjective performance

[tirmidi]

Lately I am becoming a bit cowed by the technical facility of some of the contributors here. So it is with some hesitation that I offer a purely subjective comparision of the current build of Fusion with the latest Parallels beta.

The installation of that beta (5120) was extremely troublesome--hard crash of the host requiring a power cycle, followed by two crashes of the guest before things settled down. But once up and running with my trusty old VM, the subjective performance was notably fast and crisp, whether navigating menus, launching app's. etc.

My European friends say that Americans love car metaphors, to which I plead guilty. So I would compare Fusion to my trusty Subaru outbacksolid, competent, conservative and reasonably quick though requiring a bit of thrashing of its four cylinder engine to perform well. Parallels is more like my V-8 Lexus SC400considerably more torque, faster off the line, and handles better as well. This comparison is not entirely fair, because the performance differential between the cars is far greater than between these environments. But you get the idea. I should say that I have a quad Mac Pro 3.0 ghz with 6 gb of RAM and a fairly well tweaked VM on the Fusion side. Currently running with two cores.

I have no doubt that the ever diligent team is addressing performance issues. But I still thought it might be worth noting. FWIW, my daily driver is the Subaru.

[aliasme]

You found Fusion subjectively fast and crisp navigating menus and launching apps. So, what exactly did you find better about Parallels? Is it the launch of the guest, the launch of applications, the responsiveness of the UI? Are you noticing lags in Fusion in a particular function (like opening Explorer windows)? What specific interaction caused you to make the analogy?

I am curious, because there's a couple of different angles on optimization (or addressing performance issues as you say) that come down to perceptive performance vs. actual computational power. If you benchmark the apps side-by-side you will find very similar performance in most functional except CPU and 2D. Fusion's ability to leverage 2-cores yields far greater CPU scores. Parallels posts faster 2D scores (except x64).

If you are able to explain exactly what you mean it will help the Fusion team (I think) and will also illuminate usage patterns where virtualization is still laggy compared to native hardware.