Fusion 3.0.1 - Performance even worse

[wtrose]

I've posted a couple times on the forums about my frustrating experience with 3.0. On my MacBook Pro, 3.0 runs fantastic, with full Aero. However on my Mac Pro which is my main work machine, 3.0 is running so slow that it was unusable. After attempting to fix it for a couple of days I went back to 2.0.6 which is very responsive.

Was glad to see an update to 3.0 this morning. Again it runs great on my MacBook Pro. Aero experience jumped over 3 points (though the 3D score dropped a tenth of a point). It definitely feels faster. Completely opposite experience on my Mac Pro. What was already poor performance actually got even worse. The splash screen "freezes" for several minutes during bootup. Cursor is extremely laggy. Windows could not even calculate an experience score.

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit on both machines - in fact they started out as the same VM image. Same experience with a freshly built Win 7 x64 VM.

I don't know if multiple large displays, or multiple video cards are confusing it, but VMWare 3 continues to be a major disappointment. I used to enthusiastically recommend VMWare to everyone because of my experience with Fusion, Workstation and their server products has been fantastic. I sincerely wish that could remain the case.

Mac Pro Config (in case VMWare is listening):

• Dual Core Xeon - 2.66 GHz

• 12 GB Ram

• ATI Radeon X1900 XT - 512 MB,

• nVidia GeForce 7300GT - 256 MB

• 2x 23" Cinema Displays

• 1x 19" Dell LCD monitor

• Leopard 10.5.8

[wtrose]

I finally found the time to upgrade to 10.6 today and unfortunately performance of Fusion is just as bad. This does not appear to be a problem related to the version of OS X.

I'm also very disappointed that I haven't heard anything more from VMware by now. I spent substantial time attempting different host and VM configurations that they requested and posting my results to this message. I realize it was just before the holidays, but I would have thought they would have gotten back to us with something by now.

What's going on guys? My patience is running out. This is pushing me rapidly toward giving Parallels a shot.

[kmunoz]

I gave up on Fusion about 2 months ago and never looked back. Parallels 5 is considerably faster, more stable and more integrated than Fusion has any hope of being in version 3. It's not even a fair fight at this point.

[wtrose]

I have been able to determine what the cause of my slow performance is, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I tried today upgrading my ATI X1900 XT graphics card to an ATI HD 4870. Performance was just as bad. Since I had the case dug out and open, I decided to try removing the 2nd graphics card, which I mentioned in my earlier post is an nVidia GeForce 7300GT. My VM now screams, running on just the single card.

I further confirmed that the performance wasn't related to the nVidia card by removing the ATI and reinstalling just the nVidia. It was slightly slower, as expected since it is a much lower-end card, however it was very usable - much like my laptop. No typing delay and minimal artifacts when dragging windows.

With both cards installed I have significant typing delay and windows are nearly undraggable because there is too much delay repainting the window being dragged, as the Windows experience indices below support.

As an aside, I installed a trial version of Parallels 5.0 and the performance was equally terrible. I only tested it with both video cards installed.

Other than the obvious which is to punt on the 2nd video card and third monitor, can someone from VMware offer any suggestions to work around this? Is there a start-up option or something to get VMware to "ignore" a particular video card?

Any chance of this getting fixed in the next patch?

Windows experience index (Graphics, Gaming Graphics):

nVidia 7300GT card only: 2.5, 3.0

ATI X1900 XT only: 5.9, 3.7

ATI HD 4870 only: 6.0, 6.0

dual ATI / nVidia cards: 2.0, 2.0

[sdw]

On both of my Mac Pro Desktops, I have just a single nVidia high end video card. Both were very slow, both work perfectly with 2.x.

BTW, if you want additional monitors, the external USB->DVI/VGA converters / hubs work great. I have 2 monitors on my nVidia card, and a third via USB with no noticeable lag. I wouldn't use it for gaming or video normally (I think the latter works OK), but very nice.

Color was a little off however.

This is what I use:

Plugable Universal USB 2.0 Docking Station

[MartyNeptune]

I'm new to the forums and I appreciate all of the comments and work people have put into this issue. Going by your posts I messed around a bit and here's what completely fixed my performance issues (and it's very, very simple):

1) Shut down the virtual machine

2) Go to Settings / Advanced / Other / and then change "Hard disk buffering" to "Disabled"

3) Reboot computer

Good to go.

Here's what I'm running:

MacBook Pro, 10.6.2, 2.4GHz, 2GB, Fusion 3.0.1 (which I upgraded from 3.0), Windows 7 Pro

I really hope this helps. Please let me know if this solves anyone else's problem!

[no1tmorrow]

I tried the below and my machine still locks up after I click "OK" to log in.

"I'm new to the forums and I appreciate all of the comments and work people have put into this issue. Going by your posts I messed around a bit and here's what completely fixed my performance issues (and it's very, very simple):

1) Shut down the virtual machine

2) Go to Settings / Advanced / Other / and then change "Hard disk buffering" to "Disabled"

3) Reboot computer

Good to go.

Here's what I'm running:

MacBook Pro, 10.6.2, 2.4GHz, 2GB, Fusion 3.0.1 (which I upgraded from 3.0), Windows 7 Pro

I really hope this helps. Please let me know if this solves anyone else's problem!"

[sr105]

"3) Because it eats system ram to the point I start getting swaps and the

entire system comes to a crawl."

I have the same issue. I have a few different guest OSes (XP SP3, XP SP2, Ubuntu 8.04) but my main one is Ubuntu 8.10. Whenever I compile something in the VM or an Auto-snapshot starts, my entire Mac comes to a crawl: Dock doesn't show, Alt-tab takes a few seconds to respond, etc.

• Version 3.0.1 (215242)

• MacBookPro5,3

• Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT

• Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M

Extra: In Ubuntu 8.10, the Option key routinely gets "stuck" on. I have to ssh into my VM from Terminal and kill vmware-user-loader to be able to use the VM. Also, sometimes I can't copy files to the Host or the network stops working. Killing and restarting that process seems to fix the problem until it hangs again. I'm running the latest tools using the "--default" flag to install.

I just turned off the disk buffering and will see if that has any effect.

Message was edited by: sr105: disk buffering comment

[Nuke64]

I am a new forum member here, but I would like to report a similar problem.

I'm running a new 27-inch iMac i5 with OS X 10.6.2, 8GB RAM, VMWare 3.0.1. I have two virtual machines: Windows XP x64 and Windows 7 x 64 .

When first installed, both virtual machines ran fine, except for glacially slow Photoshop CS3 performance on the Win 7 machines (I don't have Photoshop installed under XP). Now the Win 7 machine so so slow it is unusable. Win XP x64 still works fine.

I have 4GB RAM allocated to the Win 7 virtual machine.

[auroradesign]

Well my frustration continues. After purchasing a $30 support incident on Nov 24, 2009 to report this issue with disk I/O performance on an iMac i7, it is now closing in on three months with no resolution. To make matters worse I was sent a request to try editing the .vmx file, but the suggestion didn't work. I just responded to this request email and got an immediate response stating my ticket had been closed. So I now have a $30 upgrade, $30 support incident, numerous hours on the phone to support and trying things here with no resolution, which I guess qualifies my issue as "closed". At this point all I ask is my $60 refunded and call it a day.

Darryl

[coopercmg]

Not sure if this will help....I had processors set to "2" and tried changing everything mentioned in this post. However, it wasn't until I changed processor to "1" did my laggy/choppy screen behavior go away.

Hope this helps!!!

cmg

[ColoradoMarmot]

How much free RAM is on the system when the VM is running? It should be at least 1GB. Also, make sure you only give 1-core to the VM (not 2).

If you turn off Aero and all the other eye candy, it'll run faster. Also, if you turn off Unity and run in windowed or full screen mode that also runs much faster. Last, turning off mirrored folders, and other host integration (like the applications) improves speed.

In other words, Windows runs fastest when it's in a nice tight sandbox.

[admin]

1. In the virtual machine go to Start>Run. Type in

"msconfig" (no quotes) and hit Enter.

2. Now click on the "Services" tab. Enable the

checkbox at the bottom which says "Hide all Microsoft services".

3. Now disable all the other services that you see in the

list other than any service related to VMware. Make sure that you are also

disabling the antivirus service too.

4. Once this is done click on "Apply" and then

click on OK.

5. Now click on the "Startup" tab. Now here

disable all other third party startup items including the antivirus program

(except VMware related ones). Once this is done click on "Apply" and

then click OK.

Clearing the Recent Documents from within the virtual machines will also help to a certain extent.

[auroradesign]

Keep in mind my issue is not with video or overall performance, only with disk I/O. I just tried testing 3.0.2 with a fresh Windows XP, 2GB (16GB on Mac) with both a 1 and 2 processor installation, and copying a 1GB file from the VMWare shared folder pointing to my home directory took almost 30 minutes!! The same test took 41 seconds in Parallels Needless to say I'm done wasting over 3 months of my time on this and will be demanding a full refund. I wish this was not the case as I have been a loyal Fusion user since 1.0, but it is beyond me how they have been unable or unwilling to address this problem in 3 months time.

[sr105]

Keep in mind my issue is not with video or overall performance, only with disk I/O.

Seconded. It is only a matter of disk I/O performance. The recommendation of turning off disk buffering helps, but the performance is still dismal at times.

Also, I appreciate the tips on streamlining Windows, but this is not a Guest OS problem, it's a problem with Fusion.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Have you rebuilt the XP VM or realigned the partition? That helps a lot.

I still get phantom disk activity when I boot a VM for the first time in a long time, however I suspect that there's something in windows itself that's doing that (not VMWare). Defragging the guest OS, shrinking the disk, then defragging the host .vmwarevm file can also make a huge difference in performance. Turning off all the host integration features also improves things, but yeah, shared folders are slow (they're still faster than v2 for me though).

I download large files for work (VM's actually), and find that if I plug in a FAT32 USB drive my speed improves significantly over shared folders.

[coopercmg]

Odd, I did the same as you; copied a 1GB file on my guest OS (Windows XP & Windows 7) and both 1GB file took ~40-sec. each.

Although, only difference maybe type of hardware being used. I'm on Snow Leopard 10.6.2/Macbook Pro 6GB memory.

VMware Fusion 3.0.2 (232708) Both guest OS using (1-proc & 2GB memory)

My laggy screen issue was related to # of processors that I had configured. Once I reduced processors from (2 to 1) my issue disappeared.

I never had an issue with disk I/O on either guest OS. Both guest OS are running without issues.

[auroradesign]

My issue is hardware dependent. I have not experienced this issue on several MBP's or a C2D iMac, only on the latest i7 iMac. I have tried aligning the VM and creating new VM's, nothing makes the i7 better nor the other systems worse. This is also not an issue with the disk I/O of the guest as I can do a virtual drive to drive copy in the expected amount of time. This only affects copies across the shared folder which is unfortunately want I need to do. VMWare has acknowledged this issue, but as I said three months of waiting for a patch is just not acceptable.

I know the grass is always greener somewhere else which is why I have held fast for so long and Parallels is well known for releasing buggy code, but they also seem to issue patches in a timely fashion. So which is the lesser of two evils? I wish I knew...

[coopercmg]

Yeah, I feel your pain. Hopefully, the engineers will be able to get a fix soon for this issue.

Good luck!

[ColoradoMarmot]

You don't have any sort of firewall installed on either side with buit-in scanning (or antivirus on the Mac)?

Do you get the same performance issue if you use the drag/drop out of the VMWare window to the Mac desktop, or just if you do it within explorer? I also presume mirrored folders are off, and you're just using shared ones.

Try checking task manager inside windows while copying and see if the CPU or RAM has spiked. Also check for other processes with heavy disk activity.

[tcutts]

My experience is that the disk performance is still very poor for all VMs even in Fusion 3.1.2, the current version; whatever the underlying problem is here, it's still present.

• The problem seems to affect all guest operating systems.  I have Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 7 VMs.  All are affected.
• Switching all guests to one vCPU has not helped
• Switching disk caching on and off in the VM settings helps a little, but with disk caching off, I still only get about 1.5 MB/sec most of the time, which is pretty shocking.
• According to Activity Monitor, my 4GB machine still has 980MB free memory.  My machine is a MacBookPro7,1

One thing that I'd be interested to know is how this correlates with the type of VMDK being used.  Mine are all set to the thin disk in 2GB chunks - I wonder whether things would have been better if they were set to thick?

Tim