VMWare Fusion Machine runs very slow... used to run fine!

[turborave]

i have been running VMWare Fusion on my dual,

dual core 3ghz xeon intel mac for over a year. it was originally a

parallels image that i converted to vmware using their converter. it

worked great for a long time. i was able to run 3dsmax along with all

my OS X apps, CS3, all that good stuff. i have 4 gigs of ram.

over the last few months, the vmware image began to run VERY slow, windows

and menus are very laggy and slow and redraw on maximizing and

minimizing is very poor. i thought maybe it was the stability of that

particular image so i built a new one from scratch in fusion using xp

disks. even with the clean XP installation it still runs very poorly. i

am using 1.1.3 with 3d acceleration and both cpus checked off to use. i

have a gig of ram allotted to the image and i have tried 2 gigs of ram

for it to and its not any better. i feel like im running XP on a 10

year old machine with 256mb of ram. even basic tasks like launching

outlook and composing email is painfully slow.

i have fusion running on my macbook pro as well and have no trouble with it at all.

my macbook is running 10.5 and my desktop is running 10.4.

anyone have ANY insight to any of this? its driving me nuts.. i cant upgrade

the desktop machine to 10.5 any time soon, so thats not something i can

try. it ran fine on 10.4 before, so i cant see how that would fix

anything. i have tried 1.1.1, 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 versions of fusion and

they all run the image the same.

[turborave]

video playback on the xp vm fusion machine is also very bad. stutters and plays generally slow..

[turborave]

doing some testing on my mac book pro vs my desktop tower intel mac..

playing the same .wmv file on my tower mac, cpu usage is about 50% for wmplayer.exe

the same file on my mac book pro, about 8-10% cpu usage..

something must be going on with my tower mac, i have tried the 2.0 beta of fusion as well and it still runs poorly.

[turborave]

odd progress...

setting the desktop resolution to a known res, 1024x768, seems to have solved the problem, i can go in and set it a higher one now and it still works... very odd.. will test it out more tomorrow!

[elitedev]

im seeing similar probs. i ugraded my MacBook Pro (4GB) to 2.0b1 as soon as it came out, and had no problems. now i avent used VMware on here for a while (couple months?) and when i try to boot up ether of my two machines (XP, Vista, 2GM, 1cpu) it is unbelievably slow. Both take 10+ minutes (im not joking) to boot up, and are not a joy to use, to say the least, once they are.

no such problems on my desktop Mac Pro, also running 2.0b1. it has always been sightly slower than 1.x (expected, for the beta), but performance hasn't degraded since i originally installed 2.0b1.

i'll test the resolution thing when (if) this Vista machine ever comes up - it's been "restoring" for many minutes now...

could this be a fragmentation problem (either of the host disk or the client inside its disk image)?

[admin]

A simple thing to check would be to run some other guest (DSL makes a nice test, since it's small to download) and see if it has performance problems. If so, something's probably wrong with Fusion or the host. If not, something's probably wrong with the guest.

could this be a fragmentation problem (either of the host disk or the client inside its disk image)?

While fragmentation could affect performance, I seriously doubt it would to this extent. It sounds more like you're running out of RAM or the disk is overloaded. My first instinct would be to check Activity Monitor to see what's going on.

[elitedev]

The odd part is that RAM load looks really low - VMware doesn't seem to grab more than 500 megs, looking at private, shared and virtual in Activity Monitor. which i find odd - given i have 4GB and lots free, why doesn't it just grab the full 2GB i alloced fr te machine (at least as virtual)? this looks similar on my desktop though. i have 14GB physical RAM, and my main VM is set up to use 4 - but i hardly ever see VMware grabbing more than 1 gig...

in the ean time, speed seems to be up on my aptop here again, after i let the mahcines bot up, installed all the latest update, and restarted. i wouldn't call it "fast", but Vista bootup in a "resonable" timeframe now. guess we'll never know what caused this...

thanx,

marc

[admin]

As explained in , remember that Fusion uses a backend/frontend architecture. The process called "VMware Fusion" is the frontend, and is responsible for display, user input, etc. The process that does all the work is the root-owned "vmware-vmx" - if you allocated 2 GB, this one should be grabbing 2 GB.

[elitedev]

etung,

yes, i'm aware of that. i always check both processes, and afaict neither grabs anywhere near the amount of RAM allocated for the VM.

marc