I know this has to be an odd question.
I am running CentOS 5.8 64 bit specifically to play around with Apache hadoop. I am using the Hortonworks 1.0 distribution to install the hadoop ecosystem.
On my Mac (iMac, with 16GBs running Lion, Fusion 4.1.3) I find that during the setup process for the software, the CentOS cpu (as observed in Gnome System monitor) will go into a reduced priority state -- instead if chugging along doing all of the startup tasks, it throttles down to like 10% CPU utilization (the VM is a 2 core VM with 4GBs allocated) for any where from 30 seconds to up to several minutes and very little progress is made in the install process. Most of the CentOS processes are reported as sleeping when this happens.
I have observed in OS X activity monitor that the vmware-vmx CPU utilization is under 50% during these slow-downs. When the CentOS CPU is performing as expected the vmware-vmx process spikes to over 100% utilization. I want to encourage this behavior so that the Hortonworks startup tasks finish as quickly as possible.
I am running the same CentOS config using VMware Player (the latest) on a Dell PC, Windows 7 Enterprise, also with 16GB of RAM. These CPU slowdowns are almost non-existent on the PC and as a result, installation is much faster.
Can anyone explain this behavior and suggest some tweaks so that my CentOS VM is performing better?
I went looking for some .vmx file tweaks and found:
priority.grabbed = "high"
priority.ungrabbed = "high"
as suggestions. I added these to my Fusion config file and they did not help matters.
Am I barking up the wrong tree?
Is there any hope of getting better VM performance on this iMac?
Thanks
Jim
