General Performance Expectations

[DavidRobison]

I've been using VMware Workstation for a number of years now for software testing. It has never performed well for me, but just good enough to get the job done. I wanted to get some feedback from other users about whether my experience is abnormal and it should be working better, or if that's just the way it works.

There are two specific areas where the performance isn't what I would expect.

1. Restoring a snapshot. It takes a long time to restore a snap shot--on the order of minutes. Long enough that when I do a restore, I go off and do something else while it works in the background, then come back to it when it is done. Probably between 2 and 15 minutes.

2. Initial responsiveness. It takes a long time for the VM to become reponsive when I first start it, either from a paused state or restoring from a snap shot. The VM works and I can do things, but it is really slow. Applications are slow to launch. Everything feels really laggy. Eventually it sorts itself out and it starts working smoothly. Again, this takes a while so I usually let it sort itself out in the background while I do other things. It is in the 10 to 30 minute range for it to settle down.

Assuming a well configured VM and a high quality computer, is this performance normal? Or is it possible to get it working better than this?

[wila · Accepted solution]

Not really normal no.

Can you attach a vmware.log file to a reply here (the attach button is in the bottom right of the reply window)

Are you by chance running either Avast, AVG or BitDefender 2017 antivirus?

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Wil

[DavidRobison]

Thanks for the reply. Maybe I should have tried harder in the past to figure out what's been going wrong for me.

No Avast, AVG, or Bitdefender on my system.

Log file attached.

[wila]

Hi,

Apparently you're running Workstation 10 on Windows 7 x64.

I notice that Workstation is confused about the speed from your CPU. Have you perhaps done any overclocking?

Other things I see is that your VM has 8GB on RAM and that will take a bit of time when a VM is resumed/booted with the disk backing files.

If you want that part to speed up then either lower the RAM, use a faster disk or disable the RAM disk backing.

It also seems that you have quite a few snapshots (impossible to see the exact number without another file) beware that having more snapshots open means lower performance and a higher risk of data loss.

Finally you've set the VM CPU to use 4 cores.

Even while your host has 4 cores with 8 threads, setting the VM to 4 cores is likely to cause some performance issues, my suggestion is to drop that to 3 or 2 cores on the VM.

--

Wil

[DavidRobison]

Wanted to provide closure to my request for help.

I adjusted the RAM down to 2GB, reduced the cores to 2, and removed all my snapshots. Performance is better, but not what I would consider "great". I actually paid attention while restoring the VM. I can get it booted up or reverted and in a working state in about five minutes now.

My CPU isn't overclocked so I didn't do anything with that.

The VM is on and HDD and not an SSD. I imagine that might be another step to take to get it working a little better.

Thanks for your help.