Most "intense" application?

C

ccparallels

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In the next few weeks we are considering installing Avid Liquid Edition under XP under Parallels. This is normally disk intensive and folks even have dedicated their machine to use it. Are we nuts to even think of trying it? (We will NOT be using it to capture, just to edit/make movie, but curious about that anyway too.) For that matter, what are some of the more involved applications that folks have got going under Parallels?
 
Unless it relies on the GPU, odds are just about anything will run well under parallels, assuming you give it enough ram. In terms of intensity of App, about the only thing Parallels doesn't do well are things that rely on GPU hardware functions.
 
I'll guess that if doesn't do well with the GPU issues because of the hardware emulation? If so, is it understood there is still room for making this part more efficient?

Also, from what I've seen, setting the amount of RAM for the VM is black art'ish. Is there some tried and true strategy for setting RAM correctly for an app that's going to need it?
 
Seems to me I've also read to give the XP VM the least amount possible while others are saying other numbers. That's either black art, or confusion (at least on my part).
 
The fact, as reported by Parallels themselves on this board many times during beta, is to give it the MINIMUM necessary to get good performance. For some people's application workloads, that will be 512M, for others that will be 1M, and for others it will be 256M. Ultimately it depends specifically on what your running and doing concurrently. So the only way to find the optimum for your situation is a bit of trial and error.

Giving a VM a lot of memory is the WORST possible thing you can do, IF that memory is not actually needed by the VM. Because the VM ultimately is managed by OSX, any memory allocated to the VM but not used by the VM is memory that is wasted since this memory is physical RAM that is committed to the VM and thus can't be used by OSX for other needs -- inclouding servicing the VMs requests. The usual culprit with poor performing VMs on machines with adequate RAM is overallocating RAM to the VM.

As for XP, unless you are truly doing something very memory intestive (major photoshop or compiling large projects, etc) 1G will be overkill in almost every instance. The fact is the XP has never been terribly efficient with memory beyond 768M, except in a few specific instances where a single application is in fact allocating and managing that memory.
 
To add more to this, I personally have found on my 2G MBP, I get best performance in XP when set to 384M, when combined with my workload on the OSX side. But my OSX side is usually running Eclipse and Photoshop in Rosetta. Setting my VM to 768M kills my OSX side -- lots of swapping and beach balls, and even slows down my VM side. I'm sure for some people 1G is perfect on the VM side, but again, that depends on your specific app set and workload on both sides.

As for GPU performance, there is certainly room for well documented improvements to the graphics routines. Parallels has indicated OpenGL dependent items may be ripe for optimization. But for anything that bypasses a library (such as DirectX, Direct3D, OpenGL) it is unlikely we will see more than incremental improvements until GPU making starting building in hardware support for virtualization as Intel has done for their latest CPUs.
 
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It is preferable to give the VM at least 512Mb, but better to give 1Gb.

YOU MUST ALWAYS LEAVE ENOUGH MEMORY FOR THE HOST. INCREASE OVERALL MEMORY SIZE IF NECESSARY.
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I can understand VTMax's comments (and that would be the ones I would expect by default) but I can't understand ones I see made such as constant is making.
 
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