EricksonEng Tracker

Re: Super slow performance, brand new PC, brand new VM

EricksonEng — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:48:54 GMT

And this is the right answer. I cannot thank you enough for getting on here and posting this - it has made it possible for me to once again use VMWare. I don't know how this has gotten by - I know several other people that are also suffering with slow performance on VMware, and I am going to send this to them, because it has made ALL the difference! Note that since I am using player the path is indeed slightly different than in your post, just as you mentioned. So someone else reading this - if you are using player replace \VMware Workstation\ with \VMware Player\ and you should be good.

Thank you again, this is really huge!

Re: Super slow performance, brand new PC, brand new VM

EricksonEng — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 17:32:42 GMT

So indeed, the power settings make a big difference. I did find there are a couple of places to adjust power plan on new windows 11 - right click on the battery icon, go to those settings, chose "Best Performance" for power mode. This gives the best results - startup time for my software is 45s. On "balanced" it takes 65s, and the interface is slow and poor. So at least that new VM is usable on that power setting. Also, doesn't seem to degrade too much when on battery power. Still a far shot from the 18s startup time on my host, but at least it is usable, and once it's up and running, don't need to restart too often. The old VM is still unusable. I am going to try kenflagg's suggestion next and see how that does for me. Thanks!

Re: Super slow performance, brand new PC, brand new VM

EricksonEng — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 04:37:10 GMT

So indeed it is a 12gen processor. I only had balanced option, so I created a new power plan and set minimum CPU to 100%.

This appears like it may have helped. Hours of windows updates, and I am now ready to try installing my heavy software and see how it handles it. It takes 1 hour for that install, so I will let it run overnight, and test it in the morning. But at least I can do basic tasks, and while the CPU still spikes to 100%, it quickly comes back down - the machine seems usable for now.

Below are my system details, not sure how readable it is.

The weird thing, is I attacked the power thing in depth on my old system (i7, 8th gen), including bios settings and power settings inside the VM, and that never seemed to do anything. And I haven't tried that old VM again either - another test for tomorrow. Unfortunately I only have so much time. I need to get my work done too - VMs are supposed to be the tool, not the thing I actually spend my time working on!

Thank you for the help!

Super slow performance, brand new PC, brand new VM

EricksonEng — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 20:40:35 GMT

Hello,

Long time VMware workstation/player user. Had a laptop running a few different VMs, everything running super smoothly until about a year ago. Then started to notice a slowdown. Can't be sure of correlation - update Windows on guest, update to Win 11 on host - not sure. Problem made VM unusable as problem got 10x worse when on battery power. Basically, anything I tried to run would peg out the VM CPU and take forever to launch, then interface would be slow and stutter. Tried every setting related to power I could find, every setting overall. Tried re-installing windows clean on the host. Spent 40+ hours on it, couldn't get it figured out, decided to just install my software on host machine and be done with VMs for a while. The VM was basically my recovery plan - I run software that takes forever to install, and is very finicky with licensing, so my recovery plan was in the event of a computer loss/crash just carry an SSD with my VM on it for backup. Anyway, with that plan out the window, was running software on host, and sure enough, computer crashed.

So I bought a brand new laptop, i7 processor, 32Gb Ram, 1TB SSD. Installed player 17 on it, tried running my old VM. Same issue - unusably slow. So decided must be the VM itself. Created a brand new from scratch, Windows 11 VM.......and same issue! The brand new machine, assigned with 16Gb of ram, 16 processors (though for some reason task manager only shows 4),.....try to launch anything, and CPU pegs out on the VM, takes forever. Attached is a screenshot of just opening the Windows Store - 60 seconds of 100% CPU usage before it stabilizes. When idle, will sit at around 30% CPU, with some spikes. Meanwhile the host CPU is unphased - humming at around 20% CPU usage. What the heck is going on? How can a brand new machine, brand new install of VMware, brand new VM, and having all these issues? And they are the same as on an old laptop?

I tried disabling side channel mitigation in the VMX file BTW, even though I wasn't getting the warning.