Hi Guys,
I have not used VMware Fusion in many years (last version I own is v7, but never used it much due to crappy performance). I have mostly been using Parallels for our Windows development in a VM, as it is way faster than VMware. However due to the some stupid time sync issues that Parallels has, I have ben trying VMware again to see how it compares and it is remarkable how much slower it is than Parallels.
So my question is what can be done to speed things up. From my simple testing the core issues with performance in VMware revolve around two things:
1. Disk performance
2. Video performance
In years past when I created VMware machines for development purposes I would also use the SAS controller rather than the IDE/SATA one as we all knew it was a lot faster under VMware Fusion. However I don't see any way to change the bootcamp disk controller type for boot camp partitions. Is that even possible?
What other options are there to improve the disk performance under VMware?
Video performance is the other problem but I have played with all the video options (turning on and off 3D, changing the memory config etc) but nothing really helps it. Graphics is noticeably slower in many applications and you can see the difference in screen redraw speed in applications like SmartGit and VisualStudio.
To outline the core issue, when I start my VM it literally takes probably another 15-20s for the system to boot into the same state as VMware, applications like SmartGit launch noticeably slower (like taking 2x as long to start), and Visual Studio takes considerably longer to launch (and it is slow enough already!). To test the theory I timed how long it would take to do a full build of my solution under Parallels and VMware with the exact same CPU count and memory config (6 CPU, 12G memory). Under parallels, my solution would consistently build in 23s. Under VMware, it takes about 32-33s, which is a HUGE difference in performance.
I would really like to be able to continue using VMware to avoid the issues I have with Parallels at the moment, but it's pretty difficult with the performance being this abysmal.
Any suggestions on how to tune it?
