VM progressively slows after upgrade to Yosemite 10.10.4

[scarnie]

VMWare 7.1.1, host is OS X 10.10.4, VM is is Ubuntu 14.04.

Performs great after a reboot of the VM, however after some period of time anything I/O related slows dramatically and shows high CPU. It seems fine throughout the day, but between suspend / resume cycles over a day or two it exhibits this behavior. When not doing anything on VM or host, CPU is low.

[ColoradoMarmot]

How many cores are in the host (physical not virtual), and are allocated to the guest?

Ditto on how much RAM in both?

[guidobouman]

Having the same issue here.

Maxed out MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013):

  Model Name: MacBook Pro

  Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,1

  Processor Name: Intel Core i7

  Processor Speed: 2,8 GHz

  Number of Processors: 1

  Total Number of Cores: 2

  L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

  L3 Cache: 4 MB

  Memory: 16 GB

Half of the machine is allocated to the VM. (1 physical core, 2 with hyper threading, 8GB of RAM)

[ColoradoMarmot]

Virtual cores don't count - only allocate 1 core to the VM on a 2 physical core machine.

[guidobouman]

I can allocate 4, so I allocated half of my machine. Which is 2.

[ColoradoMarmot]

You can allocate 4, but from what you posted, it looks like your machine only has 2 physical cores.   If so, the only allocate 1 - hyperthreading does not count.

Also, how much RAM in the host and in the guest, and what does 'memory pressure' in Activity monitor show?

[guidobouman]

As you can see in my first post:

The machine has 16GB RAM, I've allocated 8GB for the Virtual Machine

Memory pressure is steadily at about 60~65%.

[guidobouman]

I find it very weird that I should not select 2 cores when the system clearly tells me I can use up to 4. VMWare is clearly taking hyperthreading into account...

Also, I reduced my RAM to 4GB. And with these new settings the whole VM is just a lot slower.

Your suggestions achieve the opposite from what I'm after. Even though the memory pressure in my mac is drastically lower. I'd gladly give up more from my Mac, as that's not getting any slower. I want my VM to be faster. Not my Mac.

[wila]

Hello Guido,

Why did you enable HyperVisor applications in your guest OS? Are you actually running Hyper-V Guest Virtual Machines within your Windows 8 virtual machine?

If not that should be disabled, it will slow down your Windows 8.

Same for the code profiling, normally that is not checked as it will slow down your guest OS.

PS: If your Mac performance slows down too much due to guest OS VM usage then your guest will slow down too. The host does need a certain amount of performance at OS X level in order to manage the guest.

--

Wil

[guidobouman]

Thanks for that!

I mindlessly copied those settings from a colleague. (I do Windows development on the VM, but I'm not using any code profiling tools.)

After some investigation I set the VM to 6GB, as that appears to be a nice ratio in terms of load for both OSes.

Worth noting: I disabled my windows scratch file to only utilise the RAM, which speeds up the VM quite a bit. (I'm aware of the implications, no BSOD crash reports, etc.)

[mrchainsaw]

What build? OS X 10.10.4 (14E36b) works fine.

[guidobouman]

I've had this issue since upgrading to Mavericks. But these most recent settings changes appear to work fine. Memory pressure is quite a bit lower.

[cram501]

I've had this problem since Fusion 7 was released.   I haven't found an set of options that has fixed the problem.

At some point any VM(s) I have running slow to a crawl.   Any Windows VMs I have open will take 10-15 minutes to shut down.  Linux will take 5 or 6 minutes.   Running multiple VM's usually makes the problem appear more quickly.

The only solution I have is to shut down any VM I have open, close Fusion, and restart it.    Then it will work fine for some random time (1 hour - 2 weeks) and then slow down again.   Memory seems fine.  Any action I take the in the VM at this point spikes the processor.

At this point, I"m hoping any future Fusion fixes the issue.

[fusionuserMN]

Agree.  This is an extremely frustrating issue.  I seems like it got worse with most recent Fusion upgrade.  The issue was not existent in Mid-June on my Early 2013 MBP with Mavericks.  Started happening in last month or so.  I recently upgraded to Yosemite which made no difference.   Over a few hours guest OS (in my case Windows Server 2008 R2) progressively slows to a crawl.  Can't shut down guest OS.   Power off guest OS and quitting Fusion fixes the issue for a few hours.  Stumped.   I can try some of the other poster's ideas but it seems strange that this started so suddenly.  I deleted Application bundle and reinstalled.  No improvement.   I've done all sorts of clean up on guest OS.    It used to fly. 

[fusionuserMN]

The fixes at the end of this thread seem to have resolved my issue. 

VMware fusion's Windows 7 takes long time to shut down (sometimes hang) - Ask Different