Horrible Visual Studio Performance

K

KendallB

Member
How do I submit a bug report to Parallels so they can look into and fix this problem. I use Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 inside a Windows 8.1 virtual machine, and I have been having some performance issues when developing code, which have gotten worse in Visual Studio 2013. I am using a productivity tool called Resharper, and that tool shows the problems worse than other tools, so I spent some time today debugging and profiling Visual Studio with one of the Resharper developers in Russia. Once we analyzed the performance logs, it became clear a LOT of time was being spent inside Windows graphics API calls, and he mentioned that it was a known issue that Parallels had terrible graphics performance and was the cause of the slow downs.

This was the first time I had run into this and generally have found Parallels performance to be really good for me, so since VMWare 7 was out I decided to boot my boot camp partition with it, rather than Parallels. I have always owned both VMware and Parallels, as I stopped using VMware due to some bugs it had in the past (which appear to be fixed now). Anyway, long story short I configured VMware with 1G of graphics memory and DX9 acceleration, and VOILA. Problem solved. Now my Visual Studio is ridiculously fast and smooth (I am after all running on a New Mac Pro).

So clearly there are major performance problems in the graphics drivers for Parallels that affect Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, so I hope someone from parallels is listening and will be willing to look into and fix this problem. Personally I have always preferred Parallels over VMware due to the better Mac OS intergration, but now I have no choice but to go back to VMware.

My setup:

Mac Pro Late 2013
32GB memory
3.5 Ghz 6-core Xeon E5
2x AMD FirePro D500 3072MB memory
1TB SSD
MacOS 10.9 Mavericks (soon to become Yosemite)

My VM:
Windows 8.1
8 CPU's
8GB memory
 
I doubt it, I am already running 10.1.1. I am going to try it again with 1G of video memory to see if that has any impact. VMware has a nasty habit of slowing down over time making me reboot after a couple of hours to get performance back again :(
 
There were problems with Visual Studio + Resharper bad performance in Coherence mode; we've made a lot of performance improvements in PD10 and specific improvements for VS+R# combo in PD10.1. Make sure you have Parallels Tools updated; if possible, make a screen recording or exact steps describing your issue (observing CPU usage in Task manager for devenv.exe would help; performance traces / VMWare comparsion too).
 
Mostly this happens after using VS for a while, but I have been running it today with 1G of video memory and that has actually made a lot of difference. Not sure how the video memory stuff works with the virtual graphics adapter, but this appears to have had an impact. I am running on a huge monitor (30" 2560x1600) so it is possible the old setting of 512MB simply did not have enough video memory for the virtual adapter to work well.
 
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