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vandaveer
Contributor
Contributor

Lion update 10.7.2 - Dock eating memory and CPU

I updated to OSX 10.7.2 yesterday. Since then, if I launch two VM at the same time, and ONLY then, the Dock will start eating CPU and memory. The memory usage will keep climbing until it takes every last available amount of memory. The system will come to a complete crawl. Killing Dock causes it to relaunch of course and then it starts all over. It does give me a temporary reprieve however until it can reach max available memory. I'm running on a MBP with 8 GB of RAM, a hybrid SSD main HD, and my VM's off of a secondary HD in the optibay. I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing this issue or has a solution?

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Hendey
Contributor
Contributor

Once I lean the ram up Fusion running Windows 7 running Solidworks 2012 performs really well for it being on a 13" MacBook Pro from 2009. I have 8 gig of ram which gives me a 2.5 gig left after I start my 3 gig Windows 7 session. Netwoking seams to work well for me but in my case I have a Snow Leopard server serving my files. My biggest complaint is Office for Mac and Preview which are frustratingly slow, and Windows AREO is CRAP. Mail has also got some irritating issues and Lion search in general is a mess. I have seen and heard other Lion machines run very well. As I said, most the fixes on my machine are not software related but hardware related such as Disk repair, and PRAM reset. Try these as well as the Caches clean in BOTH Library folders because the DOCK issue I had no longer exists.

Funny thing, the reason I have not reinstalled is because I havn't found a suitable harddrive to replace my current factroy drive that I can trust. Anything on the high end is either too hot, pulls too much power, or is super expensive.

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infobleep
Contributor
Contributor

Hi there

I applied the work around when on 10.7.2 and it worked. Apple claim the issue with shared folders and windows is fixed in 10.7.3 but I hadn't got aorund to testing it out. People are saying it's not fixed.

I would file reports to Apple but I get the impression they are not interested in someone like me. I do have Apple care but I'm just single home user and not a powerful business.

I am however having an issue with time machine backing up when Fusion is on. I use to have an issue where by if my MacBook disk space wasn't under say 11GB [I have 160GB internal drive and two external 500GB dirves], my disk space would go to zero and time machine fail to back up.

That doesn't happen now but Time Machine is failing to backup when I have only a small amount of memory remaining. I am only running with 4GB of memory and if I have Fusion running and other applications I might have say 100MB left. Well it seems as if Time Machine doesn't like that. Surely it can jsut use the swop file disk space and it is using some of that but still it's causing my computer to become unstable.

I've not tried having little memory with other applications and no Fusion running to see what happens. May be that will make a difference. I don't know.

I think part of the issue is that Time Machine is trying to thin my backup drive, which I connect to via firewire. Whilst it's doing this it may be running out of memory. I don't really know because this isn't an area IT I'm an expert in.

I was eventualy getting errors such as:

24/03/2012 03:48:34.000 kernel: IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType05::setPowerState(0xffffff800db86e00, 3 -> 2) timed out after 100466 ms

24/03/2012 03:50:09.000 kernel: nfs server localhost:/hfDbgcpNKvSGP_1ao_-lEY: not responding
24/03/2012 03:50:09.408 KernelEventAgent: tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_NOTRESP (1)
24/03/2012 03:50:37.000 kernel: nfs server localhost:/hfDbgcpNKvSGP_1ao_-lEY: not responding
24/03/2012 03:50:40.000 kernel: nfs server localhost:/hfDbgcpNKvSGP_1ao_-lEY: not responding
24/03/2012 03:51:08.000 kernel: nfs server localhost:/hfDbgcpNKvSGP_1ao_-lEY: not responding
24/03/2012 03:51:09.301 KernelEventAgent: tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_DEAD (32)
24/03/2012 03:51:09.302 KernelEventAgent: tid 00000000 type 'mtmfs', mounted on '/Volumes/MobileBackups', from 'localhost:/hfDbgcpNKvSGP_1ao_-lEY', dead
24/03/2012 03:51:09.346 KernelEventAgent: tid 00000000 force unmount localhost:/hfDbgcpNKvSGP_1ao_-lEY from /Volumes/MobileBackups
24/03/2012 03:51:09.364 KernelEventAgent: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s)
24/03/2012 03:51:10.000 kernel: nfs server localhost:/hfDbgcpNKvSGP_1ao_-lEY: dead
24/03/2012 03:51:12.725 Finder: ISGetIconFamilyFromStorage: seed mismatch for 2efb000d, actual seed is 79e2a9e3
24/03/2012 03:51:15.126 coreservicesd: Received request to reset fmod watch. Latest received id is 36807943736974. Latest sent id is 36807943736974
24/03/2012 03:52:52.000 kernel: IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType00::setPowerState(0xffffff800e2bb000, 1 -> 4) timed out after 100471 ms

UPDATE: I ran time machine today without VMWare Fusion running and I had no problems. I'm not sure how much memory Time Machine requires to run.

Kind regards

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imfletcher
Contributor
Contributor

So this is still happening 6+ months down the road.  What's the current situation? Right now folder sharing is flat out broken on Lion and there doesn't appear to be any hope on the horizon

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steve_goddard
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

So this is still happening 6+ months down the road. What's the current situation? Right now folder sharing is flat out broken on Lion and there doesn't appear to be any hope on the horizon
I have rewritten large chunks of the code and fixed numerous bugs and issues with the feature that looks to be the cause of this. However, since I have not been able to hit this I can't be sure that this fixes this issue as yet. As I have repeatedly stated in this thread I have been working on fixing the code and trying to reproduce this issue. So yes, there is hope!!!!
These many changes and improvements will go into the next release.
Until then please implement the workaround which disables the automatic updates of file system changes in the VM VMX file which has been mentioned many, many times already on this thread by myself or Darius. Please check my earlier posts for this.
If you have a reliable setup that hits this and a consistent state for your VM then  please send me a message with the details.
E.g. What shares do you have for the Sharing?
What mirroring if any do you have enabled?
Do you use the Unity mode, Full Screen, Single Window (VMware menu View)?
Do you have Explorer Windows open and if so on what folders?
Do you have any particular application running in the VM?
What version of Windows do you have running in the VM?
Do you have the Virtual Machine snapshots AutoProtect enabled?
Do you have any OS X applications running at the time? E.g. Time machine, drop box enabled and running?
Do you leave the VM idle for a while and if so what is visible and running when you do?
You can also send me privately a copy of the virtual machine's VMX file which will detail some of the VM configuration. You can find it under your Documents, Virtual Machines.localized folder. Unless you have explicitly created it somewhere else.
Thanks.
Steve
Thanks. Steve
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imfletcher
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the fast response.

The workaround does fix the issue.  But then again, Sharing is important.  Is there a way to manually trigger an update if auto updates are disabled?

i can't make it happen at will, but the usual culprit is Dropbox. I use DropBox only on my Lion (10.7.4) host, not on my Win7 vm.  On Lion, the dropbox goes into a constant state of syncing and uses a few hundred % of cpu.  Xcode also frequently goes haywire (probably has to do with its constant processessing of derived data for code sense)

I'm almost always in Unity mode, and only run Outlook 2010.  I don't think Explorer windows are open, as they almost never are, but I havent paid attention to that.

Thanks!

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Hendey
Contributor
Contributor

Steve,

I use VMware on a 2010 Mac Mini Server Snow Leopard, 2009 Macbook Pro 13" Lion, and 2012 iMac 27" Lion. So fare all I run is Windows XP and 7. This is a list of direct answers to the questions you list below.

Unity - I find this option intreguing but it is too finiky, combersum, and slow to be useful. I use Full Screen most of the time successfully.

Explorer windows - So fare I have had little problems connecting to network shares VPN or local, local files, and vmware-host files although the <name> No My Mac folder is no longer identified as a folder in XP but folders on my Mac's desktop show up individually so all is good.

Applications - I use my Windows VM's for many things including Solidworks and the Solidworks PDM appication. After loading the Fusion customer preview on my iMac 3.4 i7 Solidworks runs super fast. I am impressed! Please don't regress concerning Fusion performance. This is Awesome!

Snapshots - I don't use Snapshots. It takes too much space on my SSD's and for backup perposes but I can imagine the option can be very usful and have used it in the past.

Idle VM - I leave my VM's running all the time with little issue. The only problem I have is when the host goes to sleep I loose connection to network shares. This can be an issue when I have data sets open in Solidworks.

Thanks,

Matt

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steve_goddard
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

For Windows to refresh anything manually hit the function key F5. (Also, under Explorer, menu View -> Refresh too.)

This will cause Explorer to read the folder contents once more and give you the latest view.

This does not help those applications that programmatically rely on automatic updates and have no manual refresh capability. I hope that only hits very few of our users currently.

Thanks. Steve
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acstewart
Contributor
Contributor

I tried the fix mentioned in this thread with unfortunately no results.

HOWEVER, I did find out something interesting:

On my system, VMWare instances are stored in /Users/username/Documents, which Dock has a link to (for quick access). Since I never use that link, I dragged it off the Dock to remove it. Suddenly the problem went away.

Hope this helps someone.

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jojo2322
Contributor
Contributor

Dear Steve,

I applied your fix a while ago when you first suggested it, and everything has been working fine since then - at least in terms of Dock not eating up my CPU. I just installed the newest version of vmware, and when I tried to create new folders from Windows in the VM it created them (as I could tell from Finder in Mac OS), but it gave me an error message in Windows saying something to effect of "this folder can't be created because the root folder cannot be located." I'm wondering if this has something to do with the changes I made to the .vmx file to fix the Dock problem. I checked the .vmx file, and it looks like it has changed a little since I've made changes to it. Specifically, there are now two new lines below "isolation.tools.hgfs.notify.enable = "FALSE"". They are:

ethernet1.present = "FALSE"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
I guess my question is "is it safe to delete the "isolation.tools.hgfs.notify.enable = "FALSE"" line with the latest vmware update? It would be nice to have automatic updating of the file system in the VM again.
Thanks,
Matt
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steve_goddard
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Sorry to hear that there was a new issue.

However, just to clarify, what was the new version that you installed?

I have not seen the error "the root folder cannot be located?"

I don't think this has anything to do with the VMX file settings. The only thing - which might be a copy and paste issue is that there are two double quotes on the end of the line you pasted into this comment. If there are two in the VMX file try removing one of them.

Lastly, can you start a new thread with this issue and send me a message about it when you do and I will comment and look at that thread for responses from you and provide answers to that thread.

This will prevent everyone who only cares about the dock issue from getting spammed about this one and will not clutter information about this dock issue and lose your own issue among the other responses.

Thanks. Steve
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jojo2322
Contributor
Contributor

Dear Steve,

I've started a new discussion entitled

Is it safe to reinstate the directory change notification feature

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AdrielH
Contributor
Contributor

After upgrading to VMWare Fusion 5 this issue has finally gone away for me. The runaway dock was a daily issue for me since late last year, as I needed to have file sharing enabled and none of the suggested solutions made a difference. I have been running VMWare Fusion 5 for over a week without one issue! As a bonus, it is a noticeably faster VM as well. Thank you to the VMWare team for getting this out, and resolving the dock issue!

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