Sluggish Performance with Outlook 2007 on Win7 VM

[JohnAbrams]

Folks,

I'm new to this game, but I'd like to get the community's advice on my situation. Here's the system specs:

iMac, Intel i7 2.93GHz, 4GB RAM running Snow Leopard. Using Fusion 4 running Win 7 Ultimate in a VM with 1GB memory allocated and 1 processor core allocated. Anyway, the ONLY reason I have this is to run Outlook because I have 36 PST files (old email files) ranging in size from a few hundred K up to 6GB that I need to access periodically. These files are on the MAC host and are being shared to the Win7 VM through VMware's virtual file share.

Anyway, the performance, right now, is terrible. Minutes can go by waiting for Outlook to respond. Even when outlook isn't running, performance is mediocre.

I can think of lots of bottlenecks in this scenario, but I would like to get experienced guidance from you pls. Should I...

copy the pst files into the VM?

bump up memory allocation?

core allocation?

add more actual RAM to the MAC?

suggestions pls. no tomatoes.

thanks,

John

[SK9985]

I can confirm these performance issues. I'm using Outlook 2010 and have the same issue since I upgraded to Fusion 4.0.1. I noticed that switching the emails is very sluggish. I suspect it has something to do with accelerated graphics rendering (which IE is doing inside outlook). IE is also very sluggish and unstable as well as certain Aero operations. Thumbnails and Aero peek sometimes even brings the display driver to crash. Glass is gone for a couple of seconds and then it is restored and Windows reports that the graphics adapter driver stopped working. It also happened twice to bring down windows and OS X completely.

I'm very annoyed by this and I hope they fix the Aero issue soon. I'm already thinking of switching back to parallels as they are much better performance wise to my experience...

[hs51dgs]

Hi John

I've run a similar system for several years, upgrading the versions of iMac, Fusion, Windows and Outlook along the way, starting from Fusion 2 and XP and currently running OS X Lion with 8GB, Fusion 4, Windows 7 and Outlook 2010. Also, I have a similar set of PST archive files that I need to search quite often amounting to 12 GB total (most archives are around 2GB). Searching an archive is quick.

The major difference from your system is that I have my PST files on a second Windows virtual hard disk (M:) in the VM. I am pretty sure this would be faster than using the VMware share. I used to have them on the C: drive until they got too large and performance was OK from there as well.

The other thing that made a difference was having the PST files indexed. I'm not sure if W7 indexes network shares. With my W7/Outlook 2010 setup, Outlook files were indexed by default (with XP and Outlook 2003 I had to add a third party gizmo). When you change the Outlook config (eg move an archive file), it needs to reindex and you really notice the difference for a few hours until the indexing catches up.

So suggest you also make sure your Outlook PST files are being indexed and check the indexing status.

Hope this helps

david

PS I only upgraded to Fusion 4 this morning and the machine was a bit sluggish to start with. I could hear a lot of disk activity - not sure why but I assumed something to do with changing the VM compatibility setting. However as of now, late afternoon, it seems fine. I just tried a search on an archive I rarely visit and it was really quick. I would add that Outlook 2010 is noticeably faster than Outlook 2007. However Outlook 2007 wasn't slow in the way you are describing.

[JohnAbrams]

So, I upped the number of cores and memory and turned off 3D graphics and even before I run Outlook, my performance is bad: screen is laggy, spinning beach ball, long load times. Maybe something else is wrong? Here's my systems' specs:

Model Name:    iMac
  Model Identifier:    iMac11,3
  Processor Name:    Intel Core i7
  Processor Speed:    2.93 GHz
  Number Of Processors:    1
  Total Number Of Cores:    4
  L2 Cache (per core):    256 KB
  L3 Cache:    8 MB
  Memory:    4 GB
  Processor Interconnect Speed:    4.8 GT/s
  Boot ROM Version:    IM112.0057.B00
  SMC Version (system):    1.59f2

thoughts?

[gbullman]

What did you allocate to the Win7 VM?  I wouldn't go more than 2 vCPUs and 2 GB of RAM, assuming the Win7 VM is the most intensive thing the Mac is running.  If you have the Mac doing a fair amount of additional work then I'd probably lower the RAM a bit to the VM.

I agree with the previous poster that accessing the .pst s via VMware shared folders is likely going to be pretty slow.  It is OK for copying files back and for and light access but acessing a .pst would be kind of similar to a database accessing its files in that manner and I wouldn't expect that to perform well either.

I am using Outlook 2007 on a Windows 7 VM and access a couple of .pst files and have always found it to be acceptable (MacBook Pro, 10.6.8, was using Fusion 3.1.3 until this weekend, haven't had a chance to try this with Fusion 4.0.2 yet).

[JohnAbrams]

I went with 2 cores and 1024 RAM. moving the files into the VM and off the share helped quite a bit, but I'm really disappointed that VMware is sucking the life out of my i7-powered Mac. I expected better. A lot better. I'm wondering if I need to a drive wipe, reinstall OS X and see what I get. It's always something, isn't it?