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Tomsie
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Host machine locks up with High CPU and disk activity when left idle

For some time now whenever I leave my Windows 10 host PC idle for a bit (sometimes just 5 mins) it becomes unresponsive, with mouse and keyboard interaction doing nothing while Windows tries to "wake-up". Eventually it gets there but its very frustrating, with the hard disk churning and Windows claiming that every app is not responding. After turning off every imaginable power saving and sleep option I think its my VMware Workstation 12.5 as I've  managed to get Task Manager up just before everything kicked into life and I could see vmware-vmx.exe using lots of CPU

I have the VM running 24/7 as I use it for development, so this is a permanent problem. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Paul

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Tomsie
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After researching this a bit more I found that other users solved this problem by buying an SSD drive and moving all their VMware files to this. So I installed one on Friday and the problem has gone away. Huge relief and much frustration abated. Clearly VMware needs some kind of periodic disk access that is high priority and it waits until the host machine is idle (like when the phone rings or I make a cup of tea) to do what it needs to do. Breaking back into your machine, with mouse and keyboard activity then becomes a chore, and VWware is "locked" into some intensive disk and cpu activity that it just can't stop until it has completed it. Very, very frustrating when you need to just get on with work!

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bluefirestorm
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In the event you are using AVG or Avast, have a look at this thread. AVG and Avast has some hardware virtualisation feature that needs to be disabled to prevent high CPU usage/freezing, etc.

XP VM suddenly slow, Win 7 fine

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Tomsie
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Thanks. Alas, I'm just using Windows Defender

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bluefirestorm
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Then you have to provide more details.

Otherwise, it is akin to saying to a doctor that you are having a headache every morning you wake up (the high CPU when idle) and suspect that you have a brain tumour (suspect that VMware is the problem) while leaving out the detail that you drink lots of wine/beer before going to sleep (so it's hangover and the equivalent is perhaps the 24/7 development spawning builds in the VM) or something else that in your diet (perhaps the host hardware doesn't quite support the guest VM configuration).

Instead of playing 20 questions about configurations, software versions, etc; it would be best to just attach a dxdiag of both the host and guest VM; the vmx of the guest and/or the vmware.log when this high CPU activity occurs. Any detail about the 24/7 development environment would be good to know, too.

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Tomsie
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After researching this a bit more I found that other users solved this problem by buying an SSD drive and moving all their VMware files to this. So I installed one on Friday and the problem has gone away. Huge relief and much frustration abated. Clearly VMware needs some kind of periodic disk access that is high priority and it waits until the host machine is idle (like when the phone rings or I make a cup of tea) to do what it needs to do. Breaking back into your machine, with mouse and keyboard activity then becomes a chore, and VWware is "locked" into some intensive disk and cpu activity that it just can't stop until it has completed it. Very, very frustrating when you need to just get on with work!

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