Slow Win10 performance on OSX 10.11 Fusion 8

[dataf1sh123]

Wondering if anyone has very unresponsive and lagging performance running Windows 10 Pro on Fusion 8 with OSX 10.11.

I use a MBPro (Late 2013) 15" Retina with external 4K monitor, resolution is great but the performance of tabbing, moving the mouse, opening & closing programs is crippling.

On Fusion 7 with the same hardware i had Win 7 running perfectly, it did require a vmware hardware downgrade to 10 for it to work.

Have tried the same method on Win 10 but still not running as smooth as i am sure it can, anyone got any advice?

Thanks in advance!

[dondraper]

UPDATE: I did just disable 3D Acceleration and it made a significant and much appreciated improvement in rendering. I read where VMWare support was suggesting this setting. Notice I am back on Mavericks OS and staying here since folks with later versions appears to be having sluggishness issues that may not be related.

I'm also experiencing the same slowness. Was fine with Fusion 7 and Windows 8.1. Nothing changed but upgraded VM to Windows 10 and upgraded to Fusion 8. MAC OS is 10.9.5 and Fusion 8.1.0. I do have 3D Acceleration enabled so will try disabling to see if that help. Not using any mirrored folder. This MBP as 16 GB of memory.

Now that VMWare has decimated the development team for Fusion and WS, makes me worry that this will never get resolved.

TIA

Don

[TimNelms]

Performance of virtual machines on El Capitan 10.11.3 with VMware Fusion 8.1 and both Windows 7 and Windows 10 virtual machines is very slow. Increasing CPUs and memory does not help. Graphics performance seems to be a particular issue and as recommended I have turned off hardware graphics acceleration in Microsoft Office, which certainly helps. The performance degrades the longer VM runs to the point where the VM needs to be rebooted. I have previously raised service requests around performance issues in the past. Things seem to be getting worse and not better.

I would like to see a response from VMware on this thread concerning their plans around improving accelerated graphics performance.

[dondraper]

Have you tried disabling 3D Acceleration in Fusion settings?  That made a huge difference for me in Mavericks.

[MacsRule]

MemTrimRate = "0"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"

Given enough installed RAM in the host (e.g., 32GB), is there any reason not to added these additions to the .vmx file?

[bradpdx]

I'm having the same issue. 2014 Retina MBP, I5 CPU and 8GB RAM (SSD of course) with OSX 10.11. We use a mix of Macs and Windows, but use Office 365. The Mac version of Office 2016 is passable, but not great with OneDrive/Sharepoint and so I wanted to have the option of using Office 2016 in Windows for some of my work.

Brand new install of Windows 10, Fusion 8.1 on El Capitan. It works, but not well.

Even after reading these (and other) posts and making various adjustments, Windows 10 just feels lousy to use on Fusion 8. I've disabled 3D Acceleration. I've changed RAM and CPU core settings. I've gone into Terminal and added boot-args that were recommended elsewhere. Nothing makes very much difference.

Scrolling basic Word documents is hesitant and jerky, OneNote has delays going from section to section - no fun (hey, it's Office, so not much fun to begin with...). When I check the OSX Activity Monitor, scrolling a Word doc is taking over 200% CPU. Word is no efficiency champion, even the Mac version hovers around 60% doing the same thing - still, the Fusion overhead is crushing everything else when doing simple tasks. I can't imagine how bad this would be trying to edit video.

I'm considering moving this show to BootCamp (ugh) but I'd rather not. Because this particular MBP is stuck at 8GB RAM, it may be the best option.

[jayb5ab]

I'm having the same issue on both iMac 27" mid 2011 (i7, SSD, 8GB) and Macbook Pro 15" Retina, early 2013 ((i7, SSD, 8GB) running Fusion 8.1

I'm certain in my case, the issue is with Dedicated Video Memory. If I choose Hardware version 12, the dedicated video memory shows 4MB and choosing version 11, shows 128MB [in Display adapter properties]. See screenshots attached.

Performance is horrible in hardware version 12 with just 4MB dedicated memory. It's as if the virtual SVGA driver doesn't have any ram to render graphics. Increasing Shared System memory does nothing. Minimising and maximising windows is slow too. Scrolling any webpage in Edge browser is even worse.

What helped:

Check "Use full resolution for Retina display"

Uncheck "Automatically adjust user interface size in the virtual machine".

Change Hardware Version to 11 or 10 under compatibility. Lower the resolution to 1920x1200 or even lower.

This however, shows blurry text on macbook pro but does improve performance.

I believe, VMware is fully aware of all of these issues and they are just too focused in developing other products. Really poor service by a tech giant.

[ghettoiam]

I've been running Windows 7 on Fusion 7.1 for years. Worked beautifully.

Decided to start our new project on Windows 10 & upgraded to Fusion 8.1.

The performance is catastrophic once the OS boots. Slow loading, unresponsive clicks. I'm running on 4 cores, 512 GB SSD, 16 GB memory.  I'm giving Windows 10 2 cores & 8 GB memory. On Windows 7 & Fusion 7.1 Windows 7 felt "native." Really terrible stuff

My symptoms/issues are similar to all others reported here.

[MacsRule]

FWIW, I started a thread three days ago asking if anyone had found any benefit upgrading from Fusion 7 to Fusion 8. It's gotten 83 views so far but no replies, which would suggest the benefits are hard to come by. Your message suggests that's the case.

At the same time, I've been experimenting with Fusion 8.1 on a slow external and have found that if you reset the VM's hardware version from 12 to 11 using Fusion 8, you can boot the VM using Fusion 7. There doesn't seem to be any need to reinstall VMware Tools (Fusion 7 doesn't detect Fusion 8's Tools as alien). I've tried that with both a Mac VM and Windows 7 with XP Mode installed and both have worked. XP Mode worked without a hitch too. So if you've still got Fusion 7 installed, you might retreat to that.

[schmidtl4]

Adding one more vote... though it may be a little problem of being outdated.

Running Win10 on El Capitan 10.11.4. MBPro is a 13" late 2011 with 8GB memory and an Intel 2.4Ghz i5 processor.

I too had been running Fusion 7.x and Windows 7 just fine. Upgraded to Fusion 8 and Windows 10 in January and its been downhill ever since.  I feel like the frog getting boiled ... didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I resurrected a ~2011 Dell Inspiron running Windows 10 to be my temporary Windows box until I got my MBP performing correctly.  The Dell was the demise of Fusion/Windows 10 on the MBP as it gave me immediate responses to clicks, fast load times and better internet connection speeds like I hadn't seen in months.  I'm just not going back to Windows 10 on Fusion.  I might try Parallels...

For the record on my MBP I had tried:

• unchecking the Accessibility "Shake mouse pointer to locate"
• unplugging the external mouse
• unplugging the external 23" monitor
• changing memory and HD allocations
• there are only two processors so I could only run 1 for the Mac and 1 for the VM

My last endeavor was to delete Fusion and the VM (the only one) and rebuild from scratch.  No change.  Couldn't even finish installing basic software that I use due to the unbearable time it was taking.

In any event just adding my 2c in case it helps anyone avoid days of rebuilding in the hopes that something would change.  In my experience, it won't help.

Bye bye Fusion...

[USA556]

This is a sad state to be in for VMware.  To leave it like this for so long?  WTF?  I'm not typically one to get ticked off in forums either.  I've been using, and advocating VMware products to my corporate customers for many years.  But this is difficult to take. 

This is my personal machine, and VMware account.  I want to run Windows 10 Enterprise on my MacBook Pro 13' (Early 2015).  I came out of pocket (my own) for a high-end version of the MBP with 16GB of RAM, 512GB storage, and the fastest Core i7 available.  I weighed going with Parallels, or VMware to be my VM platform.  Since I'm running VMware at work, I decided to go with that.  It looks like I made a big mistake.  I should have done my due diligence. 

Hyper-V is starting too mature nicely too.  I'm just sayin'...

[JuanGuapo]

I know VMware probably doesn't want to hear this but I spent good money on this software let year, and I want to make sure they get their money's worth.

Since removing Fusion Pro 8, I've gone back to using Boot Camp exclusively--no issues. Windows 10 runs fine, and my mid-2015 15" MacBook Pro (DG) wakes from sleep with no problems now.

[Freshminded]

Almost same situation here. Got a totally new MBP 13,3 with i5 2,9Ghz... installed Fusion and then Windows 10. Windows 10 is unusable, my processor is running almost constantly on 100%. WTF is this issue not fixed yet, why is it working so badly?!?! Common VMWARE, fix this issue! I have been running Fusion for many years without problems and love it, please don't force me to leave and use Parallels

[dwc]

I had the same symptoms - after a long search I uninstalled VMWare tools in the guest system, reboot, re-install VMWare Tools, reboot.

Now the shared folders seem to have normal performance.

HTH

[StephenP3]

I am experiencing similar issues with VMware Fusion 8.1 on 15"MBPr (i7, 16GB, 512GB).

vmware-vmx in constantly using between 100% and 200% in Activity Monitor, even when VM is idle.  As a result, the fan in the MacBook is working full-pelt constantly, essentially making VMware Fusion useless.  I can't work all day with the fan constantly going at the clappers.

Thankfully I've currently on the 30 day trial.  Looks like I shan't be renewing it at the end, though.  I'll take a look at Parallels and Virtualbox.

[ColoradoMarmot]

One idea:

1) Disable System Restore

2) Disable Antivirus Scans

Both of those cause spikes like this.

[JoeVMFusion]

I too had slow Windows 10 performance on OSX 10.11 Fusion 8.  Any click or action would take several seconds to respond and often my VM would hang for minutes. It was unusable.  Fortunately, I discovered that I had set the memory level for my VM way too high (Settings > Processors & Memory). I had it set somewhere near 14000 MB of 16384 MB of my total system memory.  I was under the impression that allocating more memory to my VM would yield better performance, however, when I set it back closer to the recommended 2048 mb, all of my performance issues were gone.  I guess the host OS is the one that needed more resources and not the VM.  This, combined with some other recommended .vmx fixes, made my Windows 10 VM perform nicely!

[admin]

GUYS! jayb5ab has found the VMware bug responsible for the slowness!

Some people said to "disable 3D acceleration" and they are right, that makes it fast since it disables the graphics card emulation.

But there's the reason why that trick "works":

THE 3D CARD IN "VMWARE COMPATIBILITY 12" (the latest) IS TOTALLY BROKEN!

VMware Compatibility Level 12: Supports DirectX 10. But the graphics card driver for that level has a BUG. Windows sees it as a card with 4 MEGABYTES of memory. So Windows spends 90% of its time flushing memory on the graphics card, moving content in and out of the 4 megabytes of card memory.

Solution (for now): Set the Compatibility Level to 11. Now the card will be seen by Windows as having hundreds of megabytes of dedicated memory. That is THE solution. Not "A" solution. THE solution.

You can verify this for yourself. If you want to find out how much Graphics Card memory your computer has, open Control Panel > Display > Screen Resolution. Click on Advanced Setting. Under the Adapter tab, you will find the Total Available Graphics Memory as well as the Dedicated Video memory.

In Level 12, it says 4 MB.

With Level 11, you have hundreds of megabytes (depends on how much you gave the VM for graphics).

@VMware GUYS, please fix this bug so we can use the DirectX 10 graphics card. Something in your code is making the card look like a 4 megabyte card (about what was on graphics cards in 1993). So no wonder Windows is slow.

FIX IT.

[henkus123]

Same problem on VMware workstation 12 with Windows 10 host! 4mb dedicated with hw version 12 and 128mb dedicated with hw version 11. Go fix vmware!

[owells]

What you say about the 3D card is true. The only problem is that downgrading Hardware Compatibility Level to 11 does nothing to fix the problem. Windows 10 in Fusion 8.5 is still practically unusable. It starts off ok but within a few minutes it slows to a crawl. To the point where it takes 10-15 seconds for mouse clicks to even be registered. CPU spikes when this happening as well. The same VM on previous versions of Fusion didn't have this issue.

[ColoradoMarmot]

That sounds a lot like the host is being starved for cycles. The guest should have no more than N-1 physical (not virtual) cores in the host system, and leave 4GB of RAM free for the host as well.