Entourage fighting with Parallels??

T

TerranceJHill

Bit poster
I can run Parallels forever without a glitch, and I can run Entourage equally well. However, running both Parallels and Entourage together for any length of time (more than a couple of hours) is a sure-fire recipe for the spinning beach ball of death. Once I reach this point, my Mac continues to run, but so slowly that it's useless (responds to one click every 3 to 5 minutes). The only fix is to quit Entourage, or pause my Windows XP VM, but sometimes this takes so long that I just shut down my Mac by holding the power key. Best I can tell, it makes no difference what Windows apps I'm running.

Here's my configuration:

MacBook Pro with Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo).
2 GB RAM
OS X 10.4.9
Office 2004, with all the latest updates
Very large Entourage database (about 10 GB)
Parallels 3.0, build 4128
Windows XP Professional

I really hate using Outlook for email, so I'd like to keep Entourage, but I have to get Entourage to co-exist with Parallels. Anyone else seen this problem?
 
I have noticed a lot of kernel panics and beach balls with Entourage lately. I am not sure I can blame it on Parallels because it seems to happen whether Parallels is running or not. It seems to happen when opening an email with a lot of graphics or photo content.
 
My wife uses Entourage on her Mac Mini and Parallels is never turned off. She's never mentioned a problem with performance and I've never seen it when I use her Mini. It runs for months at a time with no reboot - that normally happens when there's an OS X upgrade. Otherwise it's 24x7 running PD 2.5, Entourage, iTunes, Windows QuickBook Pro, and FireFox.

I mention this only to suggest it's not a universal problem.
 
I also run Parallels and Entourage all day long and have never noticed any problems. I'm looking forward to Entourage 2008, though. Then I'll be 100% Rosetta-free. Despite never having conflicts, I'm not fond of the idea of running a virtualizer _and_ an emulator simultaneously...

@Terrance: I wonder if the problem you're seeing is related to your large Entourage data store. That might be a use case which escaped testing back in '03/'04 when the product shipped. First thing I'd do is look for a memory leak. You've said that the Entourage/Parallels combination beach balls after a few hours, but that Entourage is OK when Parallels isn't running. Perhaps you've discovered an Entourage memory leak (which is compounded by having to allocate RAM to a VM). See if either Real Memory or Virtual Memory values rise steadily over time using Activity Monitor. Entourage just might be doing something strange when trying to manage a 10 GB data store. Just a guess, but it's worth a look.
 
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