Atrocious performance after 3.0 upgrade...

I

istranger

Bit poster
I've been using the latest release in trial form since last night - and thus far I have to say that my experience has been EXTREMELY disappointing.

My configuration:

2Ghz. MacBook Pro
2GB of RAM
16GB free space on the hard disk
Running Parallels, Mail, iCal and Adium only

2 Windows VMs - one on the local hard disk (Windows XP), 1 on an external Firewire hard drive (120GB hard disk with 40GB free).

Each VM has 512MB of ram, 16MB of video memory allocated and every other setting is left at "default".

1) "Upgraded" VMs when prompted
2) Installation of parallels tools started automatically
--- first problem - installation of tools took an amazingly LONG amount of time on BOTH Vista and XP - we are talking 5 minutes here!

3) Performance PRE- Parallels 3.0 was fine for XP and "moderate" for Vista
4) Performance POST-Paralles 3.0 for Vista is ATROCIOUS - I mean Virtual PC was faster!
--- Applications will take as long as 2 minutes to launch
--- NOTEPAD took 30 seconds to launch
--- hard disk activity light is going NUTS
--- CPU utilization spikes as high as 150%
--- running as much as 1.4GB of virtual memory


5) Performance POST-Paralles 3.0 for Windows XP is just as bad marginally better than Vista but SIGNIFICANTLY slower than Parallels 2.x.

In one simple statement - after upgrading to 3.0 this thing has become UNUSABLE.

Anyone have ANY clue as to what is going on? Do I need to do a clean install? I have to say that at this time I am HEAVILY leaning towards switching to VMWare rather than paying the $50 upgrade fee...


Walter
 
Hi,

Upgrades here worked fine and my windows XP machine is running fine. Maybe you want to check in your task manager on windows, there has been a lot of reports lately of XP machines going very busy because they are trying to access windows site to download upgrade.

Personnaly I disable the update servce and only do upgrade manually in windows.
 
check your caching policy is set to the vm instead of osx, this has issues at the moment in some circumstances.
 
I probably should have put this in my original post - but yes, I have gone through all the "obvious" stuff - made sure I wasn't running any intensive background tasks, tried the VMs with DirectX on, then tried it with DirectX off, un-installed Parallels - including trashing the com.pref. files, made sure the caching policy was set to give preference to the VM - all the basics have been covered - my guess (from reading the boards) is that this product was rushed out of beta a bit too early...
 
Try to start your VMs and leave them in idle state for while. Some of our beta testers reported such slowdowns because Spotlight indexing mounted Windows drives. After indexing is finished performance should be back. Or try to disable Windows to Mac sharing in VM configuration.

And please check your memory settings in Preferences->Memory. Try to change to manually and change reserved value to maximum.
 
See my other post (MacFuse, USB 2.0 ....) but I seem to have found an issue with MacFUSE. My performance issue went away when I removed MacFUSE from my system and returned when I installed MacFUSE.
 
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