Windows 7 host is very slow after VMWare guest OS is suspended

[djag]

Hello.

I am using VMWare Workstation 7.1.0 build-261024 on a Windows 7 x64 host.

Every time after I have suspended a guest OS (usually either Windows XP or Server 2003) there is a period of around 5-10 minutes where I cannot use the host machine as the disk is thrashing too much.

My VMs are on a separate partition. I have disabled Indexing and Shadow copying ('Previous versions') on this partition.

From the Disk Activity monitor within Windows there is low throughput (around 1MB/s) but high activity (100%) so I guess the disk is seeking around a lot rather than reading or writing. The line showing the process with the most disk usage is:

Process: System PID: 4 File: F:\Virtual Machine\Virtual Machine.vmem Read (B/sec): 0 Write (B/sec): 1,725,070

What is the System process doing to the vmem file at this point?

Thanks

[Scissor]

Hmm...

Have you excluded .vmem files (or better yet, the directory containing your Guest files) from your Host AntiVirus?

[admin]

What is the System process doing to the vmem file at this point?

The .vmem file backs guest RAM. When you suspend, Workstation has to flush the vmem file to disk.

[djag]

Thanks for the suggestions

Yes the whole partition is excluded from anti-virus

etung:

It is not the VMWare process that is writing to the disk. It is the System process. And if it was flush operation would it not have a higher throughput?

[jimm201110141]

Hi, djag and etung, according to a kind post here,
http://olafd.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/heavy-disk-io-after-shutdown-in-vmware-workstation/

add a config line to VMware workstaton global config file C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini solves this problem. I have experienced this very problem these days and it really works for me.

mainMem.useNamedFile = “false”

My system:
* Host PC: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 x64 professional.
* VMware workstation 7.0.1, I always have "Take/Restore snapshots in the background" turned off.

It seems quite a lot of people have such problem and have taken this solution. However, I can't understand why this problem occurred to me several days ago almost at a sudden -- after 9 months of using that Windows 7 box with VMware workstation 7.

[djag]

Thanks for the link. I had switched the VMs to a second physical hard disk separate from the host OS. This has made the performance acceptable which is why I haven't looked back at this post for 8 months...

I will try the configuration change to see if it improves suspend performance any more.

In my installation the configuration suggested is not quite correct:

Firstly the file is in C:\Users\All Users\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini

Secondly, the  new line should not contain any quotes i.e. mainMem.useNamedFile = false

If there are quotes then VMWare complains that "false" is not a valid value when you try and start a VM. This is pretty ridiculous considering all the other values in the file are quoted...

[jimm201110141]

Hi, djag. Using quotes is definitely OK in VMware Workstation config.ini.

If you found it invalid, you must have copied that config line to your config.ini. Sorry to say that very line in the post incautiously uses full-width quotes(“”) instead of half-width ones(""). We have to use half-width quotes.

Oh, man, the VMware community website use a very small fonts so I neglected that faul in my post.