I've installed Parallels 6, and I must say that for a Windows XP guest, there's a marked improvement in performance and over-all responsiveness. Parallels 3 was fast, but 4 and 5 were major disappointments. 6 seems to have solved a lot of the regressions.
One problem that I'm having is with host performance. Even when I set Parallels to optimize for Mac performance, doing anything with Mac applications (like using Safari) is an exercise in extreme patience. If I forget to close Safari before booting the guest OS, it'll take 10 minutes for Safari to close. In fact, the whole Mac UI tends to freeze a lot and is generally sluggish. The dock takes several seconds to appear, as do menus, and switching apps takes a long time. (Meanwhile, guest performance is affected, but primarily for anything to do with disk I/O, while the guest UI is still fast and responsive.)
I THINK that the main problem is that I'm hitting swap heavily. My host (a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo MBP) has 3GB of RAM, while I've allocated 1.5GB to the guest. You would think that would work out well, but it doesn't.
If I try to do ANYTHING with the host (like use Safari or an IM client), everything slows to a crawl. I notice, for one thing, that the "wired" memory jumps from 400MB to 2GB, which suggests to me that the VM has locked down the guest memory, preventing it from being swapped. This seriously chokes everything else. Before starting a VM, kernel_task is usually less than 100MB of real memory, but after starting a VM, it jumps to over 300MB and STAYS that way, even after the VM is shut down. On top of that, prl_vm_app uses about 250MB of real memory.
All of this adds up to serious thrashing, making the host quite unusable. It seems that Parallels works fine if it's the only app running, but in that case, why wouldn't I just use Boot Camp?
I haven't seen others complain about this, so I'm thinking that perhaps I have something misconfigured. Would anyone out there be able to help me figure out why Parallels doesn't seem to be playing nice with host processes?
Thanks in advance.
One problem that I'm having is with host performance. Even when I set Parallels to optimize for Mac performance, doing anything with Mac applications (like using Safari) is an exercise in extreme patience. If I forget to close Safari before booting the guest OS, it'll take 10 minutes for Safari to close. In fact, the whole Mac UI tends to freeze a lot and is generally sluggish. The dock takes several seconds to appear, as do menus, and switching apps takes a long time. (Meanwhile, guest performance is affected, but primarily for anything to do with disk I/O, while the guest UI is still fast and responsive.)
I THINK that the main problem is that I'm hitting swap heavily. My host (a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo MBP) has 3GB of RAM, while I've allocated 1.5GB to the guest. You would think that would work out well, but it doesn't.
If I try to do ANYTHING with the host (like use Safari or an IM client), everything slows to a crawl. I notice, for one thing, that the "wired" memory jumps from 400MB to 2GB, which suggests to me that the VM has locked down the guest memory, preventing it from being swapped. This seriously chokes everything else. Before starting a VM, kernel_task is usually less than 100MB of real memory, but after starting a VM, it jumps to over 300MB and STAYS that way, even after the VM is shut down. On top of that, prl_vm_app uses about 250MB of real memory.
All of this adds up to serious thrashing, making the host quite unusable. It seems that Parallels works fine if it's the only app running, but in that case, why wouldn't I just use Boot Camp?
I haven't seen others complain about this, so I'm thinking that perhaps I have something misconfigured. Would anyone out there be able to help me figure out why Parallels doesn't seem to be playing nice with host processes?
Thanks in advance.