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!

[licensedtoquill]

I don't recommend anyone to try that command; I implemented it and have been struggling for four hours to get any response out of my system. Endless spinning balls, excruciatingly slow operation, NOT RESPONDING error messages even on anything as mundane as pressing START followed by RUN!

Slow boot times, non-operative hardware (even the network card was disabled and had to be re-enabled, as did for some reason the update function or the MS Security Centre)

I'd be interested in knowing how I can restore the system to its state before I pasted your command into terminal? Can I repaste it and simply substitute NO for the YES in your line? Or is there some other command for undo last operation in terminal?

fter an experience like that with windows 7, I am a bit reluctant to test on Linux VMs!

[cram501]

I ran the command with no negative impact so far.

I'll keep running multiple VM's this week and see if I run into the slowdown.

[onatan]

I too updated to 7.1.1 and reinstalled vmtools. I share the whole Mac HD with the guest Windows and have documents, downloads and desktop mirrored. In the mac file system i have a synched google drive folder. i see the beachball pretty much every time i log into the guest. The guest becomes unresponsive and in the mac's activity monitor the vmx process shows as not responding for a couple of minutes. and browsing the file system from the guest in a little nightmare. Other than that the guest is actually running OK.

I still have the pmset workaround in place to prevent the crashes i saw before. that has been a solid workaround!

[IcaPhilipGarret]

I ran this command yesterday and seen no negative consequences thus far. My Windows VM is still responsive this morning after sitting idle overnight, which hasn't happened in a long time. Fingers crossed that it continues this way.

[wila]

Hi,

licensedtoquill wrote:

I'd be interested in knowing how I can restore the system to its state before I pasted your command into terminal? Can I repaste it and simply substitute NO for the YES in your line? Or is there some other command for undo last operation in terminal?

fter an experience like that with windows 7, I am a bit reluctant to test on Linux VMs!

Not sure what you are saying, but the command was to be run at the OS X terminal so it would of course involve all the VMs - including Linux - not just Windows.

If you ran it in Windows then normally nothing would happen as "defaults" isn't a Windows command, but some application that uses the "defaults" command might be in your search path and do something with it.

In regards to restoring.. I don't have Yosemite installed (don't want) but on Mavericks the setting does not exist before setting it:

$ defaults read com.vmware.fusion NSAppSleepDisabled 
2015-03-12 19:40:03.525 defaults[47132:507] 
The domain/default pair of (/Users/$USER/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion, NSAppSleepDisabled) does not exist

--

Wil

[vnephology]

Unfortunately, my workaround success was short-lived. A day or two after I modified the App Nap setting, my VM had slowed to a crawl overnight again. As such, I've reverted back to the default using the command below. FWIW, I've also tried going back to Hardware v10 with no success either.

defaults delete com.vmware.fusion NSAppSleepDisabled

[IcaPhilipGarret]

I'm afraid to jinx it by saying this, but my Win7 vm has been running well for 3 days now without slowing down, after running:

  defaults write com.vmware.fusion NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

There are a couple of other things that I may have done differently from you that would explain the different results:

• I also ran the command with sudo for good measure (since VMware does some things at the system level).
• I upgraded to the latest Yosemite (10.10.2) recently

[cram501]

I've been running with this command for almost a week.   I've had a slowdown once.    It doesn't appear to completely remove the problem but it does appear to make it happen less often.   I can now run 2-3 VM's fairly reliably without it occurring.   I haven't been able to do that since Fusion 7 was released.

I'll keep testing with the App Nap  turned off for Fusion but so far things are much improved.

[licensedtoquill]

Since we are not getting very far with this problem, I am wondering whether there is any relevance to the constant error message I am getting "R003.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close".  There dont seem to be any references to this error message online (except from sites trying to sell antivirus software) so I wonder if it could be relevant to this problem?

[wila]

Hi,

licensedtoquill wrote:

Since we are not getting very far with this problem, I am wondering whether there is any relevance to the constant error message I am getting "R003.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close".  There dont seem to be any references to this error message online (except from sites trying to sell antivirus software) so I wonder if it could be relevant to this problem?

R003.exe does not sound much like a normal Windows file or legitimate application, the naming is a bit nondescript.

A quick search on the internet appears to suggest that it is adware perhaps even malware.

Without access to the file it is difficult to guess.

My suggestion is to locate that particular file on your computer and then to upload it to the virustotal website to analyze it.

While it might be the trigger for your problems I do not think it is the cause for the issue of the other people in this thread.

If others are getting this same error then by all means do tell.

--

Wil

edit: updated link to point to english variant of the site

[rumsky]

Had the very same problem. After updating to Yosemite, I had to update my 6.0.1 Fusion (not supported by Yosemite) and, of course, went with the latest VMware (7).

The slow down issue started but it would always take a couple of days running the VM to feel the worst effects. I tried updating to Fusion 7.1 to no avail.

Tried changing VM settings (cores, RAM etc.), tried the proposed OSX command lines and so forth but no luck either. Ended up turning off the VM every night and restarting Fusion every morning.

Comment by AllBallsRacing and downgrade procedure proposed by Wila (see above: December 10 2014) fixed it for me. Been running on Fusion 6.0.5 (compatible with Yosemite) for more than a week now (without turning it off) and slow downs are over.

I know it is not an acceptable solution for those who want to take advantages of Fusion 7 new features but it is acceptable for those who simply want to run Bootcamp in VMware without trouble. And I am not sure about pointing finger at Apple for this issue (at least solely) because as AllBallsRacing mentioned, going back to 6.0.5 works on Yosemite as before, everything else remaining equal.

I only wonder about the day Apple will distribute its Rushmore or Goose OsX, the day it possibly won't be compatible with Fusion 6.0.5 anymore... I hope the Fusion 7 issue is fixed by then or we'll have to remember not to update OsX...

Config:

MBP (2009) with 256Gb SSD and 8Gb Ram, recommended 2Gb RAM dedicated to Virtual machine running Bootcamp partition with Win7.

[licensedtoquill]

I really am not sure it is entirely fair of VMWare to expect users to pay to get this program working. Time was when they asked us to beta test and when they had the reported bugs worked out, gave beta testers the new version.

Now they charge us a by no means nominal sum for software which doesn't work and which they can't get to work while hopefully we will figure out for them precisely why it doesn't work.

I have now implemented 7.1.2 and the extreme sluggishness prevails, rendering the system, as usual, useless.  Although my system on windows 7 is exactly the same in every way as it was when I was using Fusion 4 (when all VMs were blazingly fast and the system was stable), now simply opening the 7 VM results in ridiculous amounts of memory thrashing. In fact, with nothing open in the VM whatsoever, suddenly there is not enough memory to complete the automatic installation of VM Tools!  At the end of the installation process, I get out of memory error messages and numerous oppressively slow restarts are necessary to complete the process.

Is there a memory leak in 7.1.2? Or  is this whole problem/thread caused by some sort of leak in Fusion 7?

[AllBallsRacing]

Fustion 7, in general, is a poor release unfortunately. The only solution is downgrade to 6, hope that v8 resolves it, or switch to Parallels. VMWare has been unable to explain or solve the performance issue except for one that was related to an Apple bug that is now resolved.

[mhov]

Anyone here want to confirm if the new VMWare 8 fixes this?   I tried Parallels 10 recently (for windows 10) and can confirm they have just as many (similar but different) problems as VMWare.  I think it's basically industry policy to ignore crippling issues for entire release cycles.

[AndronicusZeno]

I just installed Fusion 8 on my MacBookPro (15-inch Mid 2014 with the additional nvidia graphics card) running Yosemite 10.10.5, and it seems to have the same slowness problem.

A little background information to make sure we have the same problem:

My Windows 7 x64 virtual machine was installed using Fusion 6.  When I upgraded to Fusion 7 the performance of the Windows 7 virtual machine was awful.  I found a support article, which I cannot find anymore, that said to change the Hardware Version from 11 to 10 as a temporary fix, which worked well in Fusion 7 for the last 6 months.

Today, I installed Fusion 8 hoping to enjoy all the performance improvements.  After the Fusion 8 install, I upgraded the Hardware Version from 10 to 12 for my Windows 7 x64 virtual machine. The VMware Tools installed right after I logged into Windows, and asked me to reboot.  After reboot, the performance of Windows 7 was really slow, and I am talking about slow just trying to move around a one-page Word document slow. I just started a small Access database (all of 2MB in size at the moment), and the system would take 10 to 15 seconds to un-minimize it from the Windows task bar.

My MacBook has a 2.8GHz i7, 16GB of memory, the GeForce GT 750M 2GB graphics card, and 1TB SSD.  The Windows 7 x64 virtual machine is set to 4 processor cores and 8100 MB memory.

Also, there is a problem with reclaimable space.  When I press "Clean Up Virtual Machine" because there is reclaimable space, it just hangs for about 10 seconds and then a pop-up message says "internal error", but the reclaimable space is gone.  But then the reclaimable space reappears after the vm is turned on then back off, and the same thing happens, cleaning up the virtual machine produces a vague "internal error" pop-up message.

I downgraded the Hardware Version from 12 back to 10, and everything is fine again in Windows 7, so I have no idea why I purchased Fusion 8 when I cannot get past Fusion 6 with my virtual machine.

[cram501]

I've been having the same problem since V7 came out (slowness problem, not reclaimable space issue).  At some point, from 1 hour to 7 days, all of my VMs would slow to a crawl.  The only solution was to close them all, close vmware, and restart.  I've spent months tweaking different settings.

I made a few manual tweaks after searching the net and seeing some common settings that were recommended.  After 4-6 weeks my problem has not reappeared.  I'm not sure which of those settings solved my problem but you may want to give them a try.   I haven't gone back and figured out which setting or combination of settings helped since the issue is sporadic and I want to get work done.  I posted this same information in this thread (Guest OS's get unusably slow after a few hours / after restoring a snapshot).

The settings I have added are:

mainMem.backing = "swap"

scsi0:0.virtualSSD = 1

MemTrimRate = "0"

sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"

As usual, back up your vm and use at your own risk.  They have worked fine for me so far but each install is different.

[schmidtl4]

‌Just wanted to confirm that downgrading to Fusion 6.05 a) fixed my slow internet on Win7 guest (Yosemite host) and; b) that downgrading was as easy as @wila suggested.  I'm a very happy camper...will await confirmation that Fusion 8 and/or Apple fixes this problem before upgrading.

One item to note/confirm: uninstalling fusion on the Mac host does not affect the virtual machine...just in case anyone had concerns.

[licensedtoquill]

I was pretty offended by being told that I had to move from a working 4 installation over to 7 because earlier versions of Fusion wont work with Yosemite, and having to pay for the privilege of having a non-working Fusion 7 as set out in this thread. I cant believe how stupid I was to pay actual money for something the manufacturer seems to accept doesnt work properly

Do we now have to pay again to test out 8 for VMWare so that we can tell VMWare that it, in turn,  doesn't work properly?

Or is the perceived wisdom now that we can just downgrade to 6.05 instead, until they get 8 working? (if ever)  Does everyone accept that 6.05 doesn't suffer from treacly operation? (not just on internet)