Best Processor/Memory Configuration for Unity?

[drohrer]

I'm running a mid-2010 MBP (2.66 GHz i7) with 8GB of RAM (maxed out) and have OS X 10.8.2 running. I've also got Fusion 5.0.1 installed running Windows 7. This is my setup for work. Unfotunately I have to use quite a few Windows products for work. I use IE 9 (only for intranet SharePoint), MS Office in Windows (for those few times when Office for Mac just doesn't play right), and occasionally other Windows only products (Project, Visio, InfoPath, and a few third party Windows only apps).

I love unity. I've fiddled with the processors/memory setting in Fusion trying to get that magical balance where my Mac environment doesn't slow to a crawl yet unity programs also don't seem to take forever to start and operate. Regarding the Fusion settings, for processors I can choose 1, 2, or 4 cores and memory can go from 0 - 8GB. I've tried as little as 1 core and 1GB of RAM and that was a nightmare. Right now I'm using 3GB RAM and 2 cores, but Unity can still feel sluggish at times. I'm hesitantant to dedicate much more to Fusion. I figured before I kept tinkering I'd check here to see if there any guidelines for how to do this? I'd rather not try dozens of different options till I get it right. Anyone have any tips for me? Also, I have the "Enable hypervisor applications in VM" checked under advanced options, though honestly I'm not sure that makes much of a difference.

Again, thanks for any advice!

[avanish321]

Based on the usage described, one core and 2 or 3 GB gb ram is quite sufficient in my opinion for your guest windows.

Do you experience slowness even when not in unity mode? Try to launch the apps in single window mode.

Open task manager in windows 7 and check which process is consuming lot of cpu%.  Using this we may be able to determine the actual culprit.

[drohrer]

Programs do respond better in single window mode, but unity is so convenient, I'd prefer that mode. I'll try the single core and 3GB like you suggest. I'll also check out the task manager though I've looked there in the past and didn't see anything in particular.

[mymilkexpired]

For what its worth, I've foud that in Windows 8 on the latest release of Fusion5 I seem to run better with a single processor core versus 2. When running th two cores Windows gets choked up somethings and has to be rebooted etc to get it return to normal performance.

I'd try 1 Core and 3GB RAM. I'd also be concious of whats running on on OSX. If your working in VM primarily, I'd kill everything on OSX to keep from swapping to disk etc...

[drohrer]

This is what I've been running for about a week now and it does seem to work good. I had 2 cores running and 3GB and I too noticed poorer performance than with just 1 core and 3GB. When I need to use Fusion heavily I do try to limit OS X use. Thanks again for the advice.