Memory/freezing with all recent beta/RC's

I purchased Parallels in December on the assumption that things were constantly improving, however every beta and RC I've installed has been clunky and unusual, to the point where I now try to avoid parallels if at all possible.

Is this normal? I definitely understand the term Beta, and I can use 1970 without issue.

I have a Core Duo Macbook with 1GB ram. Running my bootcamp VM, regular XP VM, and gentoo VM all have the same effect.

Parallels takes forever to start (> 5 minutes is way to long to launch an application, and that's just to the point where I can select a VM)

If I run it for more than 10-20 minutes my mac hangs completely and must be manually powered off. I particularly notice problems when using firefox in OS X with parallels. Updating to the latest firefox made no difference.

the .mem files use a ton of harddrive space (1.5 -2 Gb), and I've tried memory settings for both parallels and the running VM from 300-700 Mb of RAM.

I'm not using dock icons, or coherence.

I'm really hanging on because I need the 3D support that's rumored to be coming, but at the moment my parallels install is unuseable. An install form scratch has the same results.

The retail box version was so slick and polished, even the most recent RC is just clunky and frustrating to use.

Any suggestions, reasons, or timeline for fixes from parallels?

 

The latest betas and RC seem to have more issues than previous betas & RCs. Also, you machine is woefully inadequate in the memory department if you truly have any desire at all to run coherence and in the future 3d. You need to upgrade to 1.5 gig min, 2gig preferable. For your amount of RAM, you need to MINIMIZE the amount you allocated to your VMs so you don't starve OSX of memory itself. I would suggest you allocate 256M to your VMs and 300M to Parallels. I also suggest you only run 1 VM at a time.

Finally betas & RCs up to RC2 had a huge memory leak that has been documented in various threads in this forum. With times like 5 min to startup, I dare share your machine was thrashing to virtual memory like crazy. I think you're going to need to scale back you expectations and/or upgrade your hardware + stick with released versions.

 

I would agree with your statement, if 1970 hadn't run flawlessly on my "woefully underpowered" machine. Since I do not have any of the new features enabled, parallels 3150 should not be requiring 3 times the resources of 1970.

BTW, when did 1GB ram become a miniscule amount? I ran windows XP under virtual PC 6 on my old G4 1Ghz with only 768 and it ran faster than the RC's do on my current machine. I don't doubt a ram upgrade would help and it's actually on order. I'd jump up to a macbook pro in a heartbeat, unfortunately it's not the pricetag, but the screen size that holds me back. I simply need to small size/portability.

What really concerns me is that parallels thrashes my system without even starting a VM. Again, just trying to provide some feedback here. I just hope the next release version will address these changes.


I've seen the memory leak suggested many times in the forums, but I've never seen a cause "documented" or solution suggested.

 

I have exactly the same issue, except I have a Macbook Core Duo with 2gig RAM. Build 1970 was really fast compared to the 'snail' that is 3150. Also the Parallels Tools in later builds (3150) are as buggy as hell and contsantly lockup my *whole* machine, not just the virtual machine.

I think Parallels has quite a significant amount of work to do before the package becomes usable. In it's current state, I would perhaps not even released it and kept it in the lab until it's more stable.

As it stands I have to use build 1970 whcih is a shame because drag and drop from desktop to desktop is really handy. Personally I don't care much for Coherence mode - I'd just like a product that does what it says on the tin!

 

Well funnily enough, i have RC2 running on my macbook with only 1gb of RAM, and it is running perfectley - previous experiances with earler builds (3050/3094) were TBH, horrid, to the point that i ditched it all for a while.
But as i say, i haven't had a single issue AT ALL with RC2. I created a bootcamp VM and it worked flawlessly 1st time, i haven't had it crash/hang once. And it takes just a few secounds for parallels to start.
It very strange that we are running on identical machines and having such different experiances. Maybe your problems are hardware related?
And i certainly wouldn't attempt to run OSX and 2 VM's at the same time - not until i get another GB of RAM anyway!

 

I should clarify that I am not running two VM's at once, all though I did once or twice under 1970 with no adverse effects, and it actually ran reasonably well.


Out of curiosity, what are the specifications of your machine? 2Ghz 1GB ram 80Gb harddrive here.

How much free harddrive space do you have?

A lot of these problems seemed to have started around the time I created a bootcamp VM, but yet you say you're running bootcamp without issues. How large is your bootcamp partition?

What are your memory settings?

Does anyone know what parallels does on startup that would thrash a machine so hard? Performance is usually much better once parallels is booted.

 

Update: I should note that after a fresh reboot this morning parallels started up very nicely and left my machine intact. However if I shut down the vm, closed parallels, and then started it again later the sluggish machine-crashing behavior resumes.

I usually don't reboot my macbook, it just lives in a perpetually suspended state. Is parallels not properly freeing some memory/other resource on shutdown / suspension of the physical machine?