Degrading performance--not a memory problem.

[mcwehner]

Each time I use parallels (whether it be with an existing vm, or the installation of a guest OS on a new one), the performance degrades over the course of a few minutes, until it's essentially frozen. It's not a memory issue: I've got 2GB of ram, and the VM has a decent slice of that. When I fire up `top', I also see that the CPU is constantly pegged, even when the guest OS is "idle". This begn to happen with build 1970, and now with the new beta build 3036.

I can't even use my VMs anymore... the slowdown issue is simply that bad. It won't go for more than five minutes or so before it's useless.

I've trawled both the forums and the web, and I can't find any evidence of anyone else having this problem. Any ideas?

- M

 

[joem]

Now there's a strange one.

You may want to stop Spotlight from indexing your VM as a test.

The only other thing that comes to mind is a piece of software that isn't playing nice with Parallels. Did you change anything between the time it was working and the time it started slowing down? If it isn't third party software interfering, my next thought would be OSX corruption, which I would test by installing OSX on an external disk, booting from it, installing Parallels (and no other third party software) and trying it.

Failing that (pretty unlikely) you're left with hardware, which it doesn't feel like from your description.

That's an odd one. Let us know how it turns out.

 

[thorprichard]

Possible cause of slowdown/freeze: Rosetta?

I've been using Parallels for two weeks now and feel very lucky that it's working well, except for the occasional freeze up.

I'm not sure if others' experiences are like mine, but these aren't the normal beachball freeze of an application in MacOS X that allow you to do other work... These are more like the old days of MacOS 9, where EVERYTHING is frozen: Can't switch apps, open menus, etc.

The system is entirely held hostage until Parallels "recovers"... and then plays back all my mouse clicks, keystrokes, etc.... which of course makes for some interesting visuals as windows, menus, etc. start flying...

Well, through some trial and error and being aware of what's occurring right before or after the freeze, I think the culprit is a nasty interaction between Parellels and something in Rosetta, the software that handles PowerPC apps on Intel processors. (And this is very plausible since both are utilizing the virtualization technology on the chip...)

Each time I try and run a PowerPC app on my MacBook Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, I'm quickly taken to the freezer where I wait for the system to thaw. This happens, for example, when starting any Office 2004 (for Mac) app while my Windows XP virtual machine is running.

Does this scenario seem familiar to you? Has anyone any suggestions on what to do? At a certain point, it almost makes it worth while to just use Office 2007 in WinXP than to try and run them side by side (in Parallel... as the name suggests). (okay, I couldn't resist the pun.)