Virtual machine sometimes very slow to restart after suspended

[eloisemac]

Hi,

I'm running Windows with VMWare Fusion 8 on a Macbook Pro with High Sierra.  Sometimes the virtual machine is very slow to restart

after suspending. I don't know why. It can take up to five minutes or more. Does anyone know why this is happening and how to fix it?

In this day and age, waiting 5 minutes or so seems rather excessive.

[ColoradoMarmot]

What's the guest and host CPU and RAM configuration?

[eloisemac]

Hi,

Thanks for your response.

Guest and host have both 8GB RAM allocated. The guest has one out of four processer cores allocated. The host CPU is 2.3 Ghz Intel i5 with turbo boost to 3.1 Ghz.

The machine hasn't always been so slow to start up, though.

[ColoradoMarmot]

It very much looks like you're starving the host.  That can pop up randomly.  General rule of thumb is no more than N-1 cores allocated to any individual VM - so for a 4 core (virtual cores/hyperthreating doesn't count) host, no more than 3 to any individual VM.  If this is a laptop, then that's a 2-core machine, so no more than 2 core for the VM.  On the RAM it's always best to leave at least 4GB for the host.

The other thing to remember it that it dumps an entire image of memory to the hard drive, so it's loaded 8GB back into ram when restoring.

Last, and this is a weird one, some of us had slow restores when the VM was on an APFS volume.  That's fixed in the tech preview.

[eloisemac]

Hi

I'm afraid I don't really follow you. My computer is a laptop with four cores (I'm assuming that's what quad-core processor means, there's also the fact that I have the option of assigning 1-4 cores to the VM). As I said, one is assigned to the VM and the three others to the host.

The host has 8GB of Ram as does the VM because of the software I use. In what sense am I 'starving the host'? You have said that I need 4GB minimum. I have more than that.

I'm afraid I don't really understand what you mean by having the VM on an APFS volume. I'm not that much of an expert!

[ColoradoMarmot]

So a Core i5 on a laptop is actually a 2 core CPU (i7 is the 4-core mobile processor).  It has hyper threading so there appear to be 4 cores, but 2 are virtual.  On that machine, you should only have 1 core allocated to a virtual machine.

If you have 16GB in the laptop, then 8GB should be fine for the guest.

It sounds like that's what you've done - 8GB to the guest (out of 16) and 1 core (out of 2). 

So the next piece of the puzzle has to do with the file systems - some people (myself included) have experienced slow resumes when running on an APFS file system (which was introduced in High Sierra).  That appears to be fixed in Fusion 11, which comes out next week.

Couple of other thoughts - have you actually shut down the VM recently, and do you have any snapshots (or worse, auto protect) in it?  If it hasn't been shut down, I'd try that, and if you have snapshots, I'd shut it down, make a backup of the VM (not time machine - copy it somewhere), remove all the snapshots and then restart it.

[eloisemac]

A while down the line and still it's ridiculously slow. Shutting down doesn't have much effect. And it suspends ALL THE TIME. I could be working on my MAc for 15 mins and then find I have to resume from suspension again. The only thing that seems to affect the speed is how long it's been suspended for. If not that long ( a few mins) it resumes quickly.

I think I'm just going to be dumping VM Ware. I can't work like this anymore.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I have one VM that suspends itself, but the rest don't - that's a mystery I haven't taken time to solve (it's not one I use all that often).  I suspect that piece at least is inside the VM and not a fusion issue.