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TheOtherJohnC
Contributor
Contributor

VM temporarily freezing using Visual Studio in guest

Hi all I'm a professional developer and I've recently switched to developing on a virtual machine.

My setup is an intel quad core system with raid 0 Velociraptor drives running Windows XP Pro 64 as the host and Windows XP Pro 32bit as the guest.

I'm using Workstation 6.5 and have my virtual machine set up as dual processor. VMWWS is set to "fit all memory into reserved host ram" and I've set other performance settings as per the VMWare pdf guide on tweaking for performance and benchmarking. There is no shortage of memory, I've tweaked it carefully and at neither the host or the guest does virtual memory thrashing occcur.

The guest and host OS do not have a virus scanner on during this process and there are no extra apps running on the vmware guest in the tray, it's as stripped down for work purposes only as possible.

Guest os drive is set to grow and I've been using it for some weeks now without it getting any larger physically. I regularly defrag from the inside out as per the vmware perf. guide.

It's plenty fast and no issues at all with a single exception that is really annoying:

I work daily in Visual Studio 2008. During builds of a large project there are moments (intermittently) during the build when everything appears to freeze for 10 to 30 seconds.

This is when visual studio is running the C# compiler csc.exe or the SGEN.exe tool, it's randomly either one when it happens but never twice or more in one build will the freeze occur. There is no discernable pattern to it, I could do 20 builds in an hour, 17 of them would be fast and normal and 3 of them would randomly do this freeze up. It doesn't necessarily happen in consecutive builds either.

I tried running Task Manager with the performance window open to see if my virtual cpu was just maxing out and here's the weird part:

When this freeze occurs, task manager also freezes, no updates, nothing. It's as if the virtual cpu has just frozen for 10 to 30 seconds, the mouse is unresponsive it's all frozen, however I can still ctrl-alt hotkey to the host or ctrl-enter to unmaximize it, the host and vmware are fine it's only inside the vm that the freeze occurs, suddenly after 10 to 30 seconds it kicks in again and continues the build as though nothing happens and keeps working.

At no other time in no other app do I see a freeze on this virtual machine and I run a lot of other apps needed for development.

Clearly it's something Visual Studio 2008 is doing but I'm not sure how what or where to start troubleshooting.

During a normal build where there is no freeze up task manager shows about normal activity, cpu usage never get's above 40% and the build goes smoothly.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

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