Parallels 10 running super slow

E

Eric_Fugate

Bit poster
I upgraded to Parallels 10 to compliment Yosemite and since the upgrade my virtual machine has been running super slow. I can see the screen being layered and built. When I click on my username to login it takes more than 2 minutes to bring up the password field. Once the password is entered I can go make a sandwich and take my time and still come back to see it loading. It is crazy slow. I have uninstalled parallels, repaired Mac HD permissions, reinstalled Parallels and reinstall tools. I have also increased the RAM to the virtual machine to 6GB - which is half of my entire Ram. Mac runs fine everywhere else but the virtual machine is still crazy slow. Any help is appreciated. If I can fix this that is great. Otherwise I need to know how to revert back to the previous Parallels version to get back the functionality.
 
Are you running Mac OSX inside a VM or windows inside the VM? I am running on a iMAC 27 i7 Mid 2011 model chipset. Rolling back to Parallels 9, under Yosemite, will not fix your problem. The problem is not Parllels specific. Other vendors are having the same issue. I believe the root cause is a driver issue with certain Mac chipsets. My mackbook pro for example works flawlessly however my iMac "stinks".

On the "Mac Guest OS Dicussion" forumn there exists several suggestions. Personally I have found that the usage of the suggest NVRAM debug option along with changes in the CPU settings and upgrading to the latest version from Parallels has resulted in a useable platform.
 
I am running OS X Yosemite on an IMac Mid 2011 with a 2.5 GHz Intel core i5 with 12 GB of RAM. My VM is running Windows XP. The reason I assumed rolling back would help is that prior to upgrading to Parallels 10 everything ran normal speed and worked well. I did the NVRAM debug and no doubt it helped but the VM is still running unreasonably slow. The rest of my setup runs normal and works very well. I guess you are suggesting that my only true solution is to buy a newer computer to run all of this stuff. I have to say in my experience with Apple products, they are well made and work perfect until at some point a free upgrade ruins the hardware. This is more true for my iPhone than anything but I see it in all their products. The crazy thing is that I kept clicking "remind me tomorrow" until I finally was annoyed enough and I just did the IMac upgrade to Yosemite.
 
Check the number of CPU's your VM is using. This is part of the hardware configuration settings. While not logical, I found that reducing this number to one fixed things for me. With the latest patch I was able to increase this to two. The setting of one is the most usable. My understanding is that some internal mechanism is performing interrupts based upon a formula. Division by one produces a more accurate answer in this case. (Think time slices to allocate to different virtual cpus all within a given "real"cycle of time)

Again this is a work around however it seems to be effective.
 
Lots of users get confused over CPU allocation. You have to suspend logic in thinking that giving the VM more CPU's will result in better performance. Simply forget the science and follow Parallels support regarding this subject - just give the VM 1 CPU, deploy the VRAM fix and upgrade to latest version of Parallels. You should find that solves most of the issues.
 
Actually, reverting to PD9 under Yosemite did fix the slow problem for me. I didn't upgrade to PD10 before I upgraded to Yosemite. PD9 ran just as well under Yosemite as it did under Mavericks but I decided to go ahead and upgrade to PD10 for the improved performance that Parallels claimed. After fighting this horrible slow problem for a few weeks, I gave up and reverted to PD9. I was not able to get the PDRemove.app tool to run so I just deleted the Parallels Desktop.app from the Applications folder and then re-ran the PD9 DMG. I was concerned that PD10 might leave stuff laying around that would interfere with PD9 but it ran just as well as it did before I installed PD10. I installed the latest version of PD10 again a couple of days ago hoping Parallels had figured out how to fix this problem. I can't tell that there's any improvement so guess I'll have to revert back again.
 
Thanks for the tip on CPUs. I've been running well over 150% on my mid-2010 MBP. Resetting to 1 CPU seems to have made a big difference. However, I've been sitting here watching Activity Monitor and it's interesting. The %CPU has ranged anywhere from 5% to 100%, but mostly it seems to stay below 50%. That's running Win 8.1 with no other apps running. Very good news if it stays this way. :cool:
***************
UPDATE: so less than 10 minutes after posting what I thought was good news I heard my fans spinning up. I had not done anything in the VM but now the AM is showing a steady load right at 100%. Something not right here. Don't want the hassle, but I may also be back to PD9.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top