High CPU Usage?

[mike2983]

Hi, I've been using Fusion for a little over a year, and while vmware has grown slower and slower over time, yesterday it started pegging the CPU and has effectively become unusable.

With zero programs started in the guest and it showing 99% idle in the task manager the host OS shows the vmware process using 20% CPU consistently. I've attached a screenshot of the activity and task manager showing this. When any programs are started in the guess the CPU quickly goes to 100% rendering both host and guest unusable.

I've applied all updates for OSX, Fusion and windows, degragmented the guest disk, increased memory allocated to the guest, tried both 1 and 2 cores, reinstalled vmware tools, turned off 3D acceleration, and all settings possible to attempt to get the CPU usage to decrease, yet nothing has helped. If it helps, the OSX version is 10.7.5(11G63) and the vmware version is 4.1.4(900582) and the guest is Windows 7 SP1 64 bit.

Could anyone suggest a next step? Thanks!

[RJIn]

Welcome to community....

Screenshot is helpful but support logs will much more helpful...

On your issue one core should be good to handle the VM. Check if spotlight indexing happens as soon as you launch any application inside Vm? If so, then performance issue is likely to happen. Clear caches from ~/library and /library and if needed re-index your entire hard drive.(it's a time taking process depending upon the data you have.)

note: shut down the vm and quit fusion before performing these steps.

Also I would suggest one core with 1 or 2 gigs of ram(depending upon the guest) should be good enough.

lastly if you have outlook configured then how many emails you have in your inbox?

I am sure you will get lot of suggestion here and hopefully we will find the root cause.... And if needed do upload the logs....(fusion menu>help>collect support logs)

thanks

[mike2983]

It's been a few weeks and I just wanted to update this thread for others that might see the same symtoms.

CPU usage died down to normal after several days so I am chalking it up to indexing after I updated visual studio which is a large install.

It does surprise me that the virtual machine is indexed by spotlight. Is there any way to diable that because I can see no reason for ever wanting to search inside the VM from the host.

Thanks again!

[WoodyZ]

If you look in the OS X Help File it should say something like, "You can use the privacy settings in Spotlight preferences to prevent folders and disks from being searched when you search for items on your computer."!

[RJIn]

Hi,

welcome back and I glad to hearing from you.

i doubt excluding vm from spotlight indexing would help but no harm in trying.(system pref>spotlight>privacy).

But did you tried reindexing of entire hard drive or clearing caches from Mac?

[mike2983]

Thanks for the tip on excluding the VM drives from spotlight, and I went ahead and did that just for good measure.

Yes, I did clear the caches and it had no effect.

I still don't understand how spotlight would cause the vmware-vmx process excessive CPU usage, unless fusion is somehow attempting to allow spotlight to "see" into the guest virtual machine? This is something that I just would never expect nor want to happen. If this was the case, this is definitely something that should be made clear as an option when creating a new virtual machine.

Thanks for the help everyone!