Huge slowdowns after Fusion 2 to 3 upgrade

CoolBru · ‎05-07-2010

I've been using VMWare Fusion for the last year or so, and I found version 2 performance was fine, however, I'd been impressed with some of the new features in 3, so I got the upgrade. I'm running Fusion 3.0.2 on 10.6.3 on an 8-core Mac Pro with 10Gb RAM, so there's no shortage of resources.

My XP VM's performance has gone from being perfectly zippy to being unusably slow. It takes 10-20 seconds to respond to mouse clicks or keypresses, launching apps takes several minutes.

None of my VM's settings have changed - it's running with 2CPUs and 792M of RAM.

I'm seeing similar slowdowns in a 64-bit Ubuntu VM. It's not nearly as bad as XP, but it now does very obvious repaints if I move windows around, apps are slow to load etc.

I also tried to start up Vista (Home 64) from my boot camp partition. It mostly worked the first time (but was slow), but networking didn't work at all, so I installed the VMWare tools and rebooted it, at which point it refused to run at all, saying I had exceeded the activation grace period, even though it was running quite happily just a few minutes beforehand.

All in all, the upgrade to 3 has been a total disaster. Is this a common experience? Any ideas how to fix this?

FWIW, virtualbox runs fine.

ReVeLaTeD · ‎05-07-2010

I've been using VMWare Fusion for the last year or so, and I found version 2 performance was fine, however, I'd been impressed with some of the new features in 3, so I got the upgrade. I'm running Fusion 3.0.2 on 10.6.3 on an 8-core Mac Pro with 10Gb RAM, so there's no shortage of resources.

My XP VM's performance has gone from being perfectly zippy to being unusably slow. It takes 10-20 seconds to respond to mouse clicks or keypresses, launching apps takes several minutes.

None of my VM's settings have changed - it's running with 2CPUs and 792M of RAM.

I'm seeing similar slowdowns in a 64-bit Ubuntu VM. It's not nearly as bad as XP, but it now does very obvious repaints if I move windows around, apps are slow to load etc.

I also tried to start up Vista (Home 64) from my boot camp partition. It mostly worked the first time (but was slow), but networking didn't work at all, so I installed the VMWare tools and rebooted it, at which point it refused to run at all, saying I had exceeded the activation grace period, even though it was running quite happily just a few minutes beforehand.

All in all, the upgrade to 3 has been a total disaster. Is this a common experience? Any ideas how to fix this?

FWIW, virtualbox runs fine.

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Rule of thumb:

VMs like 1 core. Don't ask me why. Try it and see if there's a noticeable improvement in performance.

dp_fusion · ‎05-07-2010

You're probably going to like Fusion 3.1 then. I've used the release candidate all this week in EMC Clariion storage training with a Win7 VM on my MacBook Pro (1st gen 32-bit). In Win7 I had a Citrix session going that was connected to the EMC virtual data center and since I'm on call I also had a remote desktop session to my workplace desktop via a VPN connection. The VPN circuit was handled by OS X running Juniper. Just to keep things lively, my Windows desktop runsRedHat Linux in a VMPlayer VM, and I use that to connect to and manage the Unix system I administer.

With so much going on I was using Unity to keep the screen clutter down. The Citrix session had two RDP sessions going with Win XP and Linux, and a third session running a JVM with the EMC storage manager running. Keeping the copy/paste/keyboard paradigms straight was interesting at times, particularly when copying text from the Mac command line to the Win7 VM and on to the remote desktops. That's a lot of clipboard layering.

This would have been very slow in Fusion 3.02 - as it was things moved along briskly. My Win7 session has 3D enabled, 1G of RAM, and one CPU. The Mac has only 2G of RAM total and the older Core Duo CPU.

I'm very happy again with Fusion.

CoolBru · ‎05-08-2010

I found some other posts suggesting that reducing CPU count might help, and indeed it does, returning XP to a usable speed. I increased memory allocations a bit too. It does seem strange to act this way, points to something fairly wrong with the VM! If 3.1 fixes it, great. The actual number of CPUs doesn't really matter, so long as the speed is acceptable.

ReVeLaTeD · ‎05-08-2010

I found some other posts suggesting that reducing CPU count might help, and indeed it does, returning XP to a usable speed. I increased memory allocations a bit too. It does seem strange to act this way, points to something fairly wrong with the VM! If 3.1 fixes it, great. The actual number of CPUs doesn't really matter, so long as the speed is acceptable.

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Using 3.1, and I can attest that the same rule applies. I don't know exactly what the deal is with it - I imagine the amount of resources used in VMWare and Parallels (the application itself) tries to leverage the full CPU, and gets into a tug-of-war with the VM if it's also trying to use full CPU. Don't use VirtualBox on the Mac, so can't speak to that. All I know is that it's always been that way, even on the most powerful of computers. VMWare Workstation on PC is the same way.

The problem with your Mac Pro is that Mac does not allow you to specify which cores get used for which purpose; if it would then you could get away with it. Allocate two specific cores for VMWare Fusion, two different cores for the VM, which would in theory resolve the performance issue.