Hard faults w/ Player 3.1.3 and tons of RAM?

[JWBrandon]

So, I'm trying to install Linux  (though it happened with a Win7 too...) in a guest OS configured to use 2  cores (I have 8 physical) and 2GB of RAM (I have 16GB physical). Every  so often the guest freezes, and my disk acitivity light goes nuts. While  this wouldn't bother me if it were during the file copy portions of the  installation it's during the GUI setup, which pretty much stops me dead  in my tracks for the minute or so it takes to start working again.

Naturally  I started sniffing around looking for what was generating this disk  activity. Sure enough, performance monitor shows between 20 and 100 hard  faults per minute from vmware-vmx.exe. Now, I've been doing this kind  of thing for a while, so let me rule out the obvious:

*They system has 16GB of RAM, all of which is recognized and usable by Windows 7 x64.

* There was, during the period where I was troubleshooting this, anywhere between 8 and 11GB of physical RAM free.

*  I keep a 1GB pagefile configured simply because some Windows software  is known to behave badly if it can't manage its pagefile usage.

* There are no other applications generating hard faults.

*  I use Microsoft Security Essentials for my anti-malware solution, this  presents me with no issues with other applications, but regardless I  tried both adding the relevant processes and file extensions to the  exclusions lists, and when that failed to help, disabled the real-time  protection alltogether. While this change made a difference in the  length of time the guest OS hesitated, it did not eliminate the problem.

So,  I suppose my primary question is... why is vmware-vmx.exe insisting on  paging things out of memory instead of leaving it to the WIndows Memory  Manager? Is there a way I can stop it? Is this a known issue and what  are common work-arounds or solutions to it?

Thanks!

[JWBrandon]

Reposted as suggested, didn't even realize I'd created a document the first time.

As an update, I have fiddled with the amount of available RAM to the guest to no effect whatsoever. I've also spent more time watching and discovered that at times it will peak at 200+ hard faults/minute, very confusing given that the system has yet to drop below 8GB of available RAM.

[JWBrandon]

Still having this issue, though I did manage to correct the version I was running in the subject of the discussion.

I suppose the other thing that might describe the problem I having is frequent latency in the guest, including but not limited to the inability to interact with the guest via keyboard or mouse for up to 10 seconds at a time, drastically decreased responsiveness to input in general and processes running extraordinarily slow...

[continuum]

your pagefile is way too small for my taste - I would not expect that VMplayer is stable with such a setup

[JWBrandon]

This doesn't answer the question of why it's paging in the first place. There's still 8GB of free physical memory, why page?

[continuum]

very likely you configured VMplayer so that it uses the pagefile - post vmware.log if you do not know

[alexbk66]

I have same problem (using version 5.0.0). Log file attached.

I monitor memory usage with windows resource monitor, although it says that less than 50% of memory is used, the rest of the momory isn't free, it's 'Standby", the "Free" memory is only 70MB.  So when I switch to WM Player, it starts heavy paging and takes quite long time.

Any solution?

[alexbk66]

A couple of performace tips helped me:

1. Increase memory allocated to VM

2. Ran in full screen mode (press Ctrl-Alt-Enter)

Read more:

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/18424-Performance-Tips-for-VMware