I consider myself a "Power User" in the sense that I have 2Gigs of ram and often have a dozen or more applications open. I'm finding that, unless I manually change the "VM/Guest OS/Options/VM Flags/Cache Policy" setting to "better performance of Mac OS X" that Parallels is nearly unusable as a productivity application. With the default setting ("better for Virtual Machine") I find that so much of my RAM is swapped out to disk that using other apps is a major difficulty: Long pauses, spinning beachball, slow updates, etc. I'd recommend that Parallels VMs should default to the "better for Mac OS X" cache policy. I think this is a much more user-friendly setting. For the rare person who needs to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the VM, they can manually change the cache policy setting.
I actually disagree with that. Having 2GB of RAM to run multiple OS on a system is, from my standpoint, the low end of a working system for parallels.. For me, the PowerUser, i do not start 2 Windows VM to just have them dangling around, i want to work in them (ok, i have to). Hence i want them to perform well. Maybe, if you do that, make the default based on available memory. Formula like: TotalMacRam % AllocatedRamForParallels > 3 => default to optimize Mac, as user does not care that much about VM performance, otherwise Optimize VM where 3 is something to tweak Frank
I also think it is a good idea to make the "Better performance for Mac OS" option the default, but it depends on your usage. If one uses the VM (and only the VM) for long periods of time, then this works out to their benefit, however people using only the VM might work with bootcamp instead due to the diffrences in cost/devices support. If one switches between Mac OS apps and the VM constantly, then the system runs quite slowly with the "better for the VM" option unless the VM in question does not use much RAM. For my usage the "better for Mac OS" option is set on all my VM's except for Minix, which only has 128MB or RAM. I would say for defaults, that if the amount of RAM in the VM is a high percentage of the total Mac RAM then it should default to "better for the MAC". I like the formula that fmantek came up with.
Question -- is the problem that http://www.multisolar.com/software/PDTweaker/ was created to solve still exist? Is this what this particular setting does? Or is this a different setting?
Also, I agree with posters in other forums that the memory settings for parallels is unduly complicated -- you really have to dig to find the various settings (VM RAM setting, VM Cache policy setting, and overall Parallels RAM setting) and it's not always clear what combo of settings is best. Seems like there must be a better way to manage this stuff...
