Workstation 14 Pro pauses frequently

[kfertitta]

I've now had two separate VMs become generally unusable due to frequent "pauses" during use.  Irrespective of the app I'm in, I can type freely for about 20 or 30 seconds, and then the guest becomes unresponsive for 3 to 10 seconds, and then returns to normal operation for another 20 or 30 seconds.

There doesn't seem to be any CPU, memory, or hard disk pressure (plenty of all available) and no correlation to anything in particular going on with the host -- the host is essentially idle.

Considering this is an important dev work VM, I'm pretty desperate to figure out what's going on, as re-building the image (and re-installing all of my tooling) is obviously time consuming and doesn't "last" very long as a solution.

Thanks very much in advance.

[jasnyder]

Is this a windows or Linux VM?  Can you list the OS and version?

What virtual machine hardware and resources have been assigned to the VM (i.e. mem/cpu)?

Do you have 3d acceleration turned on and do the graphics settings look appropriate to you?

Have you checked any driver/hardware status inside the VM?  Is it using the right drivers for everything, no errors reported, etc.?

What does resource utilization look like from within the VM as opposed to outside on the host system?

How many VMs are you running simultaneously?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community,

I remember that in the past some users reported about such issues, and in most cases it was caused by the VM's CD-ROM drive settings where the VM was connected to the physical CD-ROM drive.

Did you already take a look at the VM's vmware.log file, to see whether this file contains helpful entries/hints?

André

[kfertitta]

Hi Andre,

Thanks very much for the reply.  To answer some of the config questions asked -- this is a Win10 VM on a Win10 host.  No issues found with drivers graphics accleration/video.

But, I went ahead and removed the CD/ROM and printer from hardware and that seems to make all the difference in the world.  I'm gonna work for a couple hours and make sure it doesn't regress, but this would be a very welcome solution if it stays this way.

Thanks very much (so far 😉

-kirk

[kfertitta]

Thanks for your help Andre.  After working for a few hours, things seem to be back to normal now.  That's a very strange bug indeed.

Thanks much for your help!