Mojave & v14 Nightmare Experience - Slowest Performance Ever!!!

Long time parallels user on a MBPr15 (mid 2014) with 16G DDR3.

I generally steer well clear of both MacOS and Parallels updates until the market irons out the kinks as performance is critical for my work (big MS Office, Project and Visio user). Performance under Parallels v9, v10 and v13 on the various MacOS has been excellent, and only ever slows if I'm working on a very large Visio file.

Two weeks ago I upgraded to Mojave earlier than I would normally do so (why, oh why?). Immediately, Windows 7 guests in v13 were slow, but useable. I thought upgrading to v14 would do the trick, so I purchased the ongoing subscription and upgraded. After two Win7 Guest corruptions (lucky I have awesome backups), and after finally getting a VM to run, I cannot get over how bad the performance is. Outlook and Word are utterly unusable, Visio won't even start up, and even Chrome is clunky. (Yes, one of the VM's is large-ish at 110G.)

Yes I've worked through all of Parallels performance tuning suggestions (which are, frankly, short-sighted and frustratingly patronising) to no avail.

Can anyone suggest why this simple OS & Guest upgrade has killed my performance so very badly? And any insider tips on config that I might investigate?

 

Hi @Brad_Slater , Are all the other applications on your mac working fine without any issues?

 

I have a very similar issue. I upgraded to Mojave and everything seemed good, except parallels was suddenly slow. Painfully slow - sometimes taking up to 5 minutes to open simple client software (I only use Windows to open client software for my job management server). Simple tasks that were only a few clicks are now taking minutes to complete instead of seconds. I am also getting "Windows is running out of memory" messages dozens of times per day. I am debating upgrading my Mac, but I hate to spend that kind of money if its not going to solve the problem. I've been running parallel with Windows for about 5 years now and it has been great up to now..... Ideas would be appreciated. (I haven't changed any settings in Parallels or on the Mac because I don't want to inadvertently make the problem worse.)

 

Same here, Crazy long pauses where it just freezes. I cannot work with this. No solutions?

 

Hi guys, could you please make a screenshots of the Task Manager on the Windows side and the Active Monitor screenshot on the Mac side. Plz take a screenshot right after the issue reproduced and reply us back with these screenshots. Thanks in advance.

 

I've noticed similar problems with large VMs (mine are around 300-500GB), especially after copying one to make a backup. However, typically there's just one large pause (often a minute or more) after starting a VM after copying it.

One thing to consider is that in High Sierra (the version before Mojave) Apple converted all filesystems from HFS+ to the new APFS file system. This has some awesome features, like allowing you to duplicate giant files almost instantly and without using double the disk space, but that comes at a price. My suspicion is that, if you have a copy of your VM anywhere on disk, this triggers the pauses. It may be due to some writes occurring to the VM file after startup, which in turn forces the Apple APFS file system to start copying the previous data to the backup copy of the VM so as to preserve its prior state (since it can long longer be shared with the running image).

One thing that has helped minimize this for me is that I try not to maintain very old copies of a backup VM image, and I try to keep the number of snapshots relatively low. YMMV.