Extremely Slow Performance on Win7 Host

[CaptainSlow]

Hello,

I am having a severe performance issue and I'm hoping someone here can help. First, I'll list the relevent specs, then describe the problem.

Host:

Dell Laptop

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

RAM: 4 GB

Paging File: 4048 MB

Guest:

OS: Windows 2003 Server SP2

Processor: Single

VM Player:

Version(s): 2.0, 3.0, 3.1

Memory: Experimented with 1024 - 1600 MB

The problem I am having is that the W2k3 guest will perform fine for a while (30 minutes to 24hrs, it's unpredictable), then eventually performance drops of significantly. When I say significantly, I mean unusable. Task manager stays mostly

pegged at 100%, and processes which should be taking up minimal processor time are taking way more than they should be. For instance, the Task Manager process itself, when the guest is running fine, might pop up to 2% CPU usage from time to time. When the guest starts performing poorly, Task Manager is consistently taking 26-42% of the CPU. Shutting down the guest via the guest start menu and restarting the VM session does not remedy the problem....it picks up with the poor performance right where it left off. I have to reboot the host in order to get back to good performance. This works most of the time but not always. This image I am using works fine on an XP host, so I am figuring it has something to do with the Windows 7 host, especially since I need to reboot the physical machine to get my performance back. The host shows no performance issues.

I have scoured the event logs, both physical and virtual for clues but have found nothing. I have played with processor affinity for Win7, time syncronization and different verions of VMPlayer with no luck. I have disabled hibernation of the host and am using the High Performance power plan with the min and max processor states each set to 100%. The computer is always plugged in and does not go into screen saver. I can not find anything that actually triggers the slowdown.

Sometimes, it seems like guest might slow down a little, maybe by 40-50%, then eventually wham, unusable.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Attached is a vm log file from a session that has the performance problem.

Thanks in advance,

Ron

[CaptainSlow]

Bump...

Help! Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!!!

[CaptainSlow]

I am going to bump this, seeing as someone else is having a similar problem ().

I asked this question several months ago with zero responses. I am still having the problem, and desperately need an answer. I routinely use this system to demo software to customers. If I am halfway through a demo and VMPlayer suddenly slows down so much it becomes unusable, I have to reboot everything. This makes me look bad, my software look bad, my company look bad, and VMWare look bad. The behavior , as far as I can determine, is completely unpredictable as to when it will start. It might be 30 minutes after booting the computer and the image, or it might never happen. HELP!

[ckarras]

I'm experiencing the same problem under various configurations, so it's probably not a rare problem.

I tried different host operating systems:

* Windows XP

* Windows 7

* Windows 2008

* Linux

I also tried different versions of VMWare:

* VMWare Player

* VMWare Server

* VMWare Workstation

And on at least 5 completely different computers.

In all cases, I get very good performance when initially starting the VM, but it degrades considerably after a few hours, and never recovers back to a usable mode until I restart the VM.

What should I do to find the root cause of the problem?

I tried using the Windows Resource Monitor on the physical machine to try to find what's slowing everything down, but everything looks fine according to physical resources usage. Same thing if I look at resource usage inside the virtualized OS. Are there any tools to diagnose performance issues of VMWare itself?