Windows 7 VERY SLOW on Yosemite/Fusion 7.1

[dbaker0926]

I have had this issue a while and had hoped the 7.1 update would address these issues but they have not...

Originally I had Windows 8.1 on there and back in Mavericks and VMFusion 6 it worked flawlessly.  After the upgrade to Yosemite (I had beta) I've had issues but understandably.  Then after 7 came out and Yosemite I thought all would be well... but no.   I decided to go back to Windows 7 (for other reasons as well) fresh to see if the issues were maybe around Windows 8.1 but they were not (Side note... this is my Boot Camp partition).

I know there are known issues with iMac 2011's but I have a brand new MBP 2014 that's just a few months old.  I tried the workaround using the terminal debug command but it didn't seem to really help.   I just took it off and maybe it's slower... I dunno. 

I run my VM with 2 cores and 4GB of ram but any programs (IE, Word, Excel, Etc) just run like molasses.  Especially if I try to minimize or maximize a window.  If I right click on my desktop it takes about 30 seconds for the menu to come up.  If I am in an explore window and navigating thru folders looking for files it seems to move just fine.  

All in all I need this to work.  Is it a VMWare issue? Apple Issue? or what?   Can I go to Parallels and it work?  (on that note... if I do can I run Parallels using the same boot camp?)

Thanks for any help!

[gszoniec]

Have you read that - Yosemite and Fusion 7 - Very Very Slow? There is a solution.

[cram501]

That posted solution doesn't work for me.   I have a MBP and I didn't expect it to work as I am not seeing an interrupt storm. 

The VM's get slower and slower over time.   If I run one VM, it can get slow anywhere from 1 to 5 days.  If I run multiple VM's it usually starts to be noticeable within a day.

The only solution is to close out the VMs, shutdown Fusion, and restart the process. 

[dbaker0926]

So I've just given up... Moved over to Parallels and dished out the $80 just so I could work.   Parallels works fine for me.   It is definitely a Fusion issue.   I hate it because I feel Fusion is a better "value" but not if it doesn't function.

[licensedtoquill]

Are you sure you applied it properly? By opening Terminal, and running DariusD's command:

   sudo nvram boot-args=debug=0x10

and then re-booting worked fine for me, pretty much correcting my whole spinning wheel molasses-when-opened Windows 7 problem.

[benad84]

dbaker's and and I are on MacBook Pros, mine the late-2013 model. The workaround you posted is only for newer iMacs.

The issue we have is specifically about the graphics performance of Windows in a VM after a few days of use. It doesn't happen right away. Also, it's not a Mac Yosemite issue, since the bad graphics performance doesn't happen in VirtualBox, Parallels or older versions of VMware Fusion.

In fact, Fusion 7 made graphics performace so bad that "Unity" is unusable. Resizing windows is so slow you end up accidentally at the wrong size when releasing the mouse. Also, the sound drivers are skipping all the time (a *huge* issue for the work I do), and it doesn't natively support booting Windows 8.1 Boot Camp in 64-bit EFI mode (it uses the DOS boot, messing up the drivers). All of those issues are specific to Fusion 7.

[cram501]

I am on an early 2013 MacBook Pro.    The workaround doesn't help me at all.

Over time, the VM becomes unusable.   It can take an hour or a week but it eventually becomes unusable.   If I have multiple VM's open (windows and linux), it usually happens in a shorter time frame.  When it hits, it can take a Windows VM 15 minutes to cleanly shut down.  When it occurs there is no interrupt storm occurring as seen on the iMacs.    Any action pegs the CPU for the VM and things go slowly from there. 

The native OS X is working fine for me while this is going on.   I haven't had a chance to start disabling features or updating settings to try to narrow down what issue may be causing the problem.

[licensedtoquill]

This would seem to indicate some need for further research:

Mine is a my mid 2010 mbp using Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B0F with SMC Version (system): 1.58f17

I will report back if the VM slows down to unusable; meanwhile linux hasn't done so.

[licensedtoquill]

I seemed to have either the reverse problem, or lots of them as my problems with the VMs were always accompanied by endless spinning balls, indicating problems with OSX. When they died down, any command in the VM would start the spinning ball in the host OS again.  Not only were the problems in the VM not coordinated with the problems in OSX, I could sometimes enter commands in the VM through the spinning ball!

None occurred specifically with graphics and none seem to occur in Linux at the moment.

[PhilipGarrett]

Just wanted to say "me too!"  The VM performance during the day is ok. But If I leave my Windows 7 virtual machine running overnight, when I start work in the morning the VM is unusably slow. It takes several minutes to shut down and restart, if it ever shuts down.

It smells App Nap-related. Unfortunately turning off App Nap doesn't seem to be an option for Fusion 7.1.

I'm running VMware Fusion 7.1 Professional on Yosemite 10.10.1, on a mid-2012 Macbook Pro.

[benad84]

Me too. Both VirtualBox and Parallels don't exhibit the issue, and generally have much faster graphics drivers than Fusion. Since I have to use Windows for work, I just had to cut my losses and move on to Parallels.

The most frustrating thing is that Fusion 7 brings so little compared to Fusion 6, all the while bringing major performance issues. Fusion 6 was generally faster on my 2013 MBP than Fusion 7 or 7.1. I cannot find the justification of taking huge risks to upgrade Fusion and pay a premium for that.

[licensedtoquill]

Just to report back my findings, which will unfortunately be no surprise to anybody.

Long term, any fix which I mentioned has had little effect.  All VMs in Fusion run excruciatingly slowly after they are first started on Windows and (to a slightly lesser extent) Linux VMs.  After a few weeks, even the spinning ball has come back.  I am slightly surprised that these problems took so long to come back, whatever that means.

I can't offer any solutions and it is becoming blindingly obvious that VMWare can't either.

Drawing a parallel, Alsoft also couldn't do much initially to get their Disk Warrior working with Yosemite either. But pretty quickly they determined that DW wouldn't work with FileVault2.  They rolled out two fixes, the often-impractical 'disable FileVault2' fix. And the We-Have-Fixed-It 'Buy (our) new software' fix.

VMWare seems to be steering a mid-course with their Buy-Our-New-Software (or VMs won't work at all) fix while not being able to get the new software they have sold working properly.

Enough users seem to have given up on Fusion already, with the no-news-from-VMWare approach. In the past, the company has put out fixes quickly when there were problems:  Have they made this software end of life?

Disabling FileVault2 is an easy but massive enterprise, involving copying virtually the whole system to spare space on the hard drive.  I would be interested to know if it improves anything for Fusion? (or if it gets Yosemite working any better!)

[onatan]

I'm with the same problem on a mid 2014 MBP w 16GB RAM. One of the obvious suspects for me is that whereas before, (on 6.x fusion and whatever it was that preceded yosemite) in Activity Monitor, the vmware-vmx process was showing more or less the same memory as was configured for the windows vm (4GB), since the upgrade it shows consistently around 277MB!! I don't understand the magic here...how can that be?

[dariusd]

Hi licensedtoquill,

We're aware of a new performance problem resulting from an incompatibility between Fusion and OS X update 10.10.2.  This might be the cause of your beachball problems if you have any Shared Folders (including desktop mirroring) where the shared folders contain aliases to remote servers or to disconnected drives.

If that describes your situation there, rest assured that we're working on releasing an update to work around this latest issue.  In the meantime, you should be able to work around it by moving any such aliases out of your shared folders.

Hope this helps!

--

Darius

[licensedtoquill]

Thank you for your response and I can't be sure (and won't know until I install the patch) but I am pretty sure I don't use any aliases or references to removable shared drives which have ben removed

[licensedtoquill]

OK Here are the preliminary results to the application of the patch, even though I don't use aliases and don't share removable drives AND the sirupy/beachballs predated 10.2.2.

It seems to have worked??  I haven't had the VM running for multiple days yet but it seems to be stable.  There is no flakiness, no bouncing balls, no slowness, no lengthy startup or shut down times.

Is everyone else finding this?

[IcaPhilipGarret]

I installed Professional Version 7.1.1 (2498930) and still have the problem.

[cram501]

I assume by the patch you mean the update to 7.1.1. 

I have the same problem with 7.1.1.   The VM usually starts out fine and degrades over time.  That time before it degrades could be 10 mins or 7 days.   If I start a second VM using the same share, it usually degrades pretty quickly.

I don't have any aliases or references to shared drives with the shares I'm using.

[Wallman]

I am seeing the same issue on 3 of my Macs running the latest VMware Fusion Pro 7.1.1

I too have 16 GB of Ram, run 2 Cores and the recommended 4GB allocation. When the Windows 7 64bit VM is up and running the Macs lose available memory (Using Memory Clean to Check) from 5+ GB available to less than 100MB available. Once the VM is shutdown, the Macs stabilize at around 5+ GB available once again.

You can push the button to clean the memory and it will increase from 100MB to around 3.5GB for a few minutes, then return to 100MB available. This tells me there is a major memory leak, but I am not technical enough to know what can be done, other then continue to wait for a solution.

Thanks for any help that can be provided.....

[dariusd]

On the contrary, you have shown that it is not a memory leak... A true memory leak could not be fixed up by any external tool such as Memory Clean or purge.  What you are seeing is the OS storing a lot of information in RAM that would otherwise be unused -- it's called "Inactive" or "File Cache" in Memory Clean.  Unused RAM is wasted RAM, and modern OSes optimize to keep stuff in RAM (in inactive memory or in file caches) for as long as possible.  Memory Clean and purge will force OS X to discard the stuff that it had cached in RAM for later reuse... It'll give you more "free RAM" now, but if any of that formerly-cached material is needed again, it will need to be fetched from disk (or SSD) again instead of it being ready in memory.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[vnephology]

I had a similar situation where performance would degrade over time with Fusion 7.1, Yosemite 10.10.2, and a Windows 8 VM. I knew that Fusion had problems with App Nap in the past, so I wanted to try disabling. Unfortunately, it appears that it can no longer be done from the "Get Info" dialog. Fortunately, I was able to disable via the command line and my problems went away. I'm not too concerned with lack of App Nap support since my machine stays plugged-in 90% of the time. Anyway, you may want to give it a try. Here's the command you can try in terminal:

defaults write com.vmware.fusion NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES