My PD 4 experience after 10 days

Hello there,
i was happy user of PD 3. Now, after resolving lot of problems at the begining, I got PD 4 running.
But:
- It starts windows XP much slower than PD 3
- The overall performance is not quier as stated, it is slower
- Graphics (office windows update for example) sometimes starts to be exteremely slow, you can actualy count in which sequence the objects are updated. This happens sometimes after coming back from stand by or after living my mac unattended for a while.

PD 4 is untested and bullshit imo.

And yes, I have updated to 3540, and yes I have uninstalled and restarted and re installed P Tools.

Please advice how to get the good PD 3 experience back in PD 4!

 

I have to agree with this statement! Much slower.

Paul

 

Guys,

I'm reading a lot of posts daily both on our forum and in the internet. The user experience with PD4 performance is quite different. I saw both the "it's a lot faster than PD3" and the "it's much slower than PD3" statements. The latter statements are mostly scattered around our forum (it's the support forum after-all, usually you don't visit it unless you have a problem).

You can help us understand the issue better and come up with the fix or workaround if you write more details about your experience. Say,

1. What exactly is slow? Is it guest OS boot, or maybe your main business application, or your daily routine tasks take longer, or the interface seems sluggish?
2. How slower it is? Like it's twice slower, or 30% slower?
3. How much CPU is used on your Mac when you feel PD4 slow? You can check it if you run Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor. Is it possible that while it's slow, the prl_vm_app process consumes enormous amount of CPU?
4. Please make Help->Report a problem and provide it's ID. The report contains a lot of useful information about your configuration and some logs that are necessary to understand the problem.

Thank you

 

Tim

I'm glad to see someone from the company using the threads to bring focus to something so vague and providing a framework to capture the right information that will help us all.

Let me start by explaining that my primary use for using Microsoft in a VM is to use Office 2007. I am a frequent (all day) user of Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and to a lesser extent OneNote. When working for the right client I am also a daily user of SAP GUI on the Windows VM. I also on occasion use Fireworks for image display and manipulation. I use my VM all day (12 hours) during the week business week and to a lesser extent on the weekend.

Where I notice sluggishness is on boot, opening Office applications, toggling between open Office applications, and general GUI (start button menu / task bar ) click & response. I have a tendency to describe the problem as intermittent because sometimes the Office apps are snappy and other times painfully slow; however, as the problem persists it seems the longer the VM remains booted the snappier things become. But the time it takes to achieve "snappiness" seems far greater with the current build of 4.0 than it did with 3.0. Visually, it seems as though Vista is booted and there is no hour glass on the screen but I know that I will need to wait a while (10 to 15 mins maybe) before i'm confident the GUI and apps will respond in a timely fashion. At times i've waited at least a minute or more just looking at the Outlook splash screen. Keep in mind I have changed neither the hardware or any VM config settings since 3.0 where everything was solid and snappy. The only change in the environment is the latest Parallels and Leopard updates.

Also, at the time of slugishness CPU usage doesn't seem to be an issue. I use iStat and have both processors monitored in the toolbar.

I'll update the post over the next week or so with any changes or new findings.

Hope this helps!

BTW Tim, when are you guys going to invite me into your beta program? I've been active on the forums since 2.0. I'd be glad to help.

Shaun

17" MacBook Pro
2.33 Ghz C2D
2 GB RAM (1 OSX, 1 VM)
320Gb HD
Parallels 4.0 Build 3540

 

Thanks, Tim. I'm in the camp of happy and successful with PD4, but facing a few (minor) issues.

In my case, the time from turn on to logon prompt for XP SP3 is very slow. During this time, the CPU for prl_vm_app is very high, often close to 200% and sometimes more (??). I'm using the terminal command "top -o cpu" to watch this. This one is a problem for me because one of the reasons I use parallels is for demo purposes and it now takes a lot longer to get into the demo that it used to.

Once I get signed in and the system gets up and running, the business apps perform nicely with what seems to be good performance. I have not noticed the painfully slow office apps that Shaun reports, yet my usage scenario seems similar to his. I have observed an occasional sluggishness to some office apps but it has not been consistent enough to really identify or report. I would have to say that once the system is up I am not seeing a slow system.

When would you like me to "report a problem" to capture the best data? During the slow startup phase? I could do that. Just let me know.

About a month ago, I made some very detailed timings of windows startup/logon, screen to screen navigation of one of our corporate website apps, and startup times for various office apps. At the time, parallels V3 on my powerbook pro was far superior to the other tools tested (VMWare on a comparable laptop running windows XP, Microsoft Virtual PC on a comparable laptop running XP, and Microsoft Virtual PC on a comparable laptop running Vista Business x64). I have those timing, so I can closely compare Parallels V3 to V4. I will make some tests with V4 and let you know the real differences.

Paul

 

Guys, I had a similar problem with slowness (Imac, Windows XP 4gb memory).

I uninstalled Parallels Tools completely through the Control Panel Applications function, rebooted the Mac and reinstalled the Parallels Tools. Then I rebooted the Mac. Now startup is snappy and no problems with Windows 2007.

Don't know if this will help you or not.

 

Here are the detailed timings.

My computer: Macbook Pro, 2.6GHZ Core 2 duo, 4GB Memory, OSX 10.5.5
Virtual computer: Windows 2003 Server, 768GB Memory

The only thing running on my mac was Parallels. I tried a 1 cpu and a 2 cpu configuration. All times are in seconds.

Time from start to logon prompt: V3 = 18; V4 1 CPU = 53.56; V4 2 CPU = 68.19
This is a significant difference. As a comparison: VMWare on a comparable windows computer running the same VM = 43.34 seconds; Vritual PC on a comparable windows computer running the same VM = 62.97

Timing to run our entire application test: V3 = 87.7; V4 1 CPU = 164.76; V4 2 CPU = 166.7

So yes, V4 is substantially slower. Even if I exclude the startup time, V3 = 69.7; V4 1 cpu = 111.2; V4 2 CPU=98.51

What happened to make parallels so slow?

Paul

 

Rebooted the mac, or rebooted the VM?

I'll give it a try.

Paul

 

Can I quote myself? I tried the control panel uninstall / reboot/ reinstall/reboot sequence and re-ran my timings. No significant difference.

Paul

 

Hi,

Could try the following:

1. Open C:\Windows\System32\drivers folder
2. Delete all files starts with prl (Do not touch files with prl_)
3. Restart Windows
4. Install Parallels Tools from a menu

Best regards,
Alexander

added: prl_paravirt_32.sys should be deleted also before reinstalling tools.

 

Hi Tim,

1. The OS starts at least 20-30% slower than before. It was 400% at the beginning, but it seems to have been solved at some point.
2. The main thread is SLUGGISH like you say. Basically, running an app seems to be slower, but I am not sure. What I am very sure about is that after a while, sometimes immediately after start, sometimes after coming back from stand-by, PD 4 starts to react slowly to my inputs, the graphics updates slow, ... Example: you close a window and you can see how each part of the window disappears and how the task bar at the bottom updates. In Win XP, when you close a window, the small rectangle in the task bar disappears and then the rectangle placed on this right side are moving to the left to take its place. In that case, it takes 4-5 s until it is done, the rectangles moving slowly to the left.

I filled a case ID yesterday, but can not find its ID. I used the email address used in my forum profile to fill it, you should be able to find it.

One good point: 3D is GREAT.

 

Will do it immeditaly.
I can say you already, these files are version 3.0.5608.0! Here the list:
prleth.sys, prlfs.sys, prlmouse.sys, prlvideo.sys

 

Hi,

One more addition to my suggestions. Please delete prl_paravirt_32.sys also.

Best regards,
Alexander

 

There is NO "prl_paravirt_32.sys" file on my system!!!

 

Did that: deleted prleth.sys, prlfs.sys, prlmouse.sys, prlvideo.sys as well as prl_paravirt_32.sys, all belonging to the version 3. reinstalled parallel tools and did not notice much... prl_paravirt_32.sys was never reinstalled as some other files ... check the attached pict and please advise.

 

My mistake, so many changes. Sorry. In PD4 it is called prl_pv32.sys

 

Did that: deleted prleth.sys, prlfs.sys, prlmouse.sys, prlvideo.sys as well as prl_paravirt_32.sys, all belonging to the version 3. reinstalled parallel tools. prl_pv32.sys was reinstalled as some other files ... seems indeed faster but still having a 100_150% load on the Mac caused by prl_vm_app

 

This one has the right version 3540.

 

Could you open Task Manager in Windows guest and check if there any applications/processes with 100% CPU usage?

 

noooooooooooooooo !!!! nothing runs !!!! I answered this question 100 times !!! I even sent the outcome of terminal operations asked in relation to that and no reply (check my posts)!!!!