Upgraded to v6, now it's slower

E

ErikR

Junior Member
Where are all the 40% increases in everything that was advertised? Yeah, I know I shouldn't have upgraded right away, but I couldn't help myself.

Is there some special configuration I need to set up to get all these new tweaks to work?

My system is:
Mac Pro dual 2.26 Quad-Core Xeons
8 GB RAM
Nvidia 8800GT
OS X 10.6.4

My current Virtual Machines settings are:
Windows 7
CPU: 2 (although the dropdown lists up to 8)
Memory: 6144 MB
Performance: Faster Virtual Machine
Tune Windows for Speed
Power: Better Performance

Is there something I should change?
 
Hello,

You don't need to do a special tricks to make it faster, all optimizations should work by default in any configurations.

1) What exactly do you mean by "slower"? Some tests scores, or slower Windows boot time, or application start, or slow 3D or what? Could you please explain it.

2) Could you also:
* run PD6
* wait until Windows is booted
* send problem report (top menu -> Help -> Report a Problem)

and then copy-paste ID number in a reply to this thread.

Thank you!
 
aa. said:
slower Windows boot time, or application start, or slow 3D
Click to expand...

Yup, all those. When it's booting up the Windows boot up music breaks up (as do cues from other programs with music). The hard drive is constantly making noise like it's being written to or defragged. The Mac side is also slowed down (like typing this message).

The problem report id is: ID 6640608.

thanks
 
Keep your old VM, but try making a new Windows install and see if you have the same issue choppiness. I've created all new VMs for v6 and Parallels is screaming fast.

Mac Pro quad 2.66
8 GB RAM
ATI 4890

Also, your using x64 Windows right? Try giving the VM 5GB of ram rather than 6, maybe 3GB on the OSX side (vs 2GB now) will make a difference. Unless your processing oil drilling seismic data, you probably won't notice a difference with Win.
 
Yup, 64bit Win7. How would I make a new VM Windows install, since I've already used the product key for the first one?
 
I guess you could try creating a new custom VM but for the hard disk point to the hard disk in the original VM. If you move the old VM to the trash don't forget to move the .hdd out of the old VM.

I think the first thing you should try though is lowering the VM RAM to 5 GB or less.
 
First of all, thank you for the problem report!

joevt said:
I guess you could try creating a new custom VM but for the hard disk point to the hard disk in the original VM. If you move the old VM to the trash don't forget to move the .hdd out of the old VM.
Click to expand...

I don't think it could help...

I think the first thing you should try though is lowering the VM RAM to 5 GB or less.
Click to expand...

I'd like to advise to set, say, 2G for the beginning. Just to check whether the problem in RAM size, or somewhere else.

Anyway 6G of RAM on a host with 8GB can be too much. I recommend to use 4G on such hosts.
 
You don't need to reregister if you do a 2nd install, just leave the product key in the Windows installer blank (and uncheck the auto-activate box). It'll give you 30 days of usage, definitely enough to for some old fashioned trouble shooting.
 
Erik,

thank you again for this report. Looks like you have huge swap in/out on host side.

I. How to improve VM performance

Please try to do the following:
1) Run PD6 (but do not start Win7)
2) Go to top menu -> Virtual Machine -> Configure -> Boot order
3) Add this to the "Boot flags":
vm.mem_anonymous=0

This flag can help if you dedicate more than a half RAM to a VM on Mac host with > 4CPU and >= 4GB RAM

2. Memory size recomendations

And again I recommend you to reduce VM memory size down to 4GB. It should not affect Windows much, but it will leave some free memory for MacOS, so overall system performance will be optimal.

For 12GB hosts I recommend to limit VM memory to 8GB.
 
For some reason I didn't get an email that there were new responses. I'll try out the settings and let you know how it goes. Are there any benchmark tests I can run to check everything out?

Thanks
 
I think it's working better now. System doesn't seem slow. I did try a game that didn't work before, and it still doesn't, so I guess it's still too much for a VM.

Thanks.
 
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