Parallels 15 (Pro) Desktop very slow on iMac Pro

Unusable performance on a €5000 machine, and these dipshits still think I am going to pay €80 for another year of their crap app? Haaa, ha, ha. That was my reaction to their reminder email today.

 

On top of slow Excel and Outlook on the Windows 10 VM, accessing the Mac SSD drive takes 20-30 seconds to establish the access. After that the access to the drive is fast, but if I switch to the Mac for a few minutes and switch back, it takes again the same 20-30 secs to access. I think the Outlook performance are related to the case that the mail box files are all on the Mac drive (to be backed up with my Mac. All this is new on PDT 15.

I can live with the slow Excel (not using it much and if I need, I can use it on the Mac as well), but the slow access to the SSD drive makes it impossible to use. Any ideas ?

 

Hi and could you also please reproduce the issue and collect the tech data report and then post the report's ID here?

 

Added Technical Report: 330701486

 

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: (Extremely frustrated like everyone else) I've been following this chain for months after experiencing severe degradation of performance with v15. Reverted to v14, with modest improvement, but still VERY SLOW as of today. I've delayed upgrading MacOS to Catalina pending resolution of the Parallels problems.
REQUEST: Will Someone from the PARALLELS TEAM please tell us something useful (or at least hopeful)?
URGENCY: We needed a fix months ago. Without a fix, there will be an escalating number of users migrating to alternative workflows without Parallels.

 

Maria,
could you give US some sense of what Parallels is ACTIVELY doing to address this issue? I ask because of the recent experience with the mouse freezing issue, amongst others. Through MANY build updates over two major version updates, we where asked many times to provide these technical reports. And yet, over more than a year a fix never materialized, and when it finally did, Parallels didn't even list it as a fix. it just quietly happened, almost as if it was just a side effect of something else, and Parallels actually cared so little about the mouse problem that it never made it into the bug tracking system, and all the "send us a technical report" was so much "Make these retard customers feel better, but keep ripping them off" lying. Sorry to be so blatant, but yes, as far as I can tell, Parallels was lying to customers then, and lying to customers now. Which is why I am hoping you can help prove me wrong, by showing us this issue in the bug tracking system, and letting us know how many engineering hours are currently being assigned to it, and what priority management has given it. Given the rather shabby way Parallels has treated its customers and these kinds of issues historically, I think Parallels owes us that. Many of us have been customers for many years. And we are tired of being lied to and treated like trash.

 

macbook pro 16 (64gb, i9 2.4) Catalina 10.15.2, PD 15.1.2 (47123) Pro Edition. The performance was not nice using Parallels hypervisor (Windows 10 Pro 1909), the UI was bit frozen (delay to open start menu and etc..) when I was opening project in VS 2019 or building it (.net core project). The project is very small (few classes and controllers). Seems disk I/0 caused high cpu usage ???. I switched to Apple hypervisor in settings for now and it is much better

 

How dare you treat your customers like this. What a completely frustrating and totally dissapointing result. 3 days of wasted work - only to find v15 is almost beta level software at best. The support was even worse, 4 hours of useless attempts to get things operating made it worse, so I pulled the plug. After years of buying this VM, we won't be EVER renewing any license from his mob. Now I have to port all the applications and data to a new PC. Wish me luck - nothing better to do for the next 2 days. Appalling that anyone would actually charge money for this. As a software developer - Mid range, I find this type of developed application a farce. I'm sure if someone made a tool to port this to Bootcamp they'd make a fortune.

 

Parallels 15 is slow and keeps locking up. It's junk, I want my money back. 14 is so much better!!!!

 

I have the same performance problems which I can't continue like this (2 days ago, I was at a customer site and had to wait few minutes while the customer is looking at my screen on the projector, waiting for my Outlook to open, accessing files from the Mac and opening Excel, huge embarrassment ... :-( ).
How do you downgrade ? I just tried it and my Windows 10 PVM does not start after the downgrade. Do I need to do something before I downgrade (the instructions was to shutdown the Windows 10, take a backup (just in case), install version 14 (which will auto remove version 15 - it did) and start). I have try reboot also, just in case something was needed reset, but does not work, the PVM does not start.
Thanks for any help.

 

Hi All
I don't know if this will help anyone but for what it's worth here we go.

I have had the slow windows 10 issue for a very long time now but today have come across something that has made a significant difference!

There is a process in the activity monitor called "photoanalysisd." It is the process by which apple categories the picture files in photos and help with facial recognition and search features. This is ALWAYS churning away when photos is not open. To cut a long story short this eats up your CPU if you have a lot of photos that need to be categorized and reeks absolute havoc while trying to use the virtual machine. If you do a google search of "photoanalysisd" there is a whole lot of chatter about it being a beast that can never be stopped literally).
Anyway I found this work around in an article as follows:

QUOTE (SOURCE:https://dev.to/gjbianco/controlling-photoanalysisd-3j2a)
"Shut down Photos. 
Hold down option key while tapping on Photos in the Dock -> This brings up the option of choosing a library, or creating a new one!
Create a new library, call it "Empty Photos Library"
Done. Keep the original library around and switch back to it using the same system in case you need it.
I even tried deleting the Photos app - turns out that is impossible. Photos is basically the Adobe Acrobat of 2019. A horrible POS that installs itself like a Kraken into your system, impossible to remove.
Nothing else worked for me in OS X Catalina."

This was the only way to stop photoanalysisd from eating up a ridiculous amount of my CPU and once I have done that windows 10 is the MOST responsive I have ever had.

Worth a try. The only down side is that you have to "option click" the photos tab and select your correct photos library any time you want to open your photos library afterwards but a small price to pay for a much faster machine!!
Kind regards
Mark Botham-Clarke.

 

I was very disappointed, after many years of using "Parallels Desktop" for my job without ever having had a problem, in August 2019 I bought a new Macbook Pro, a 4000 € machine !!! and therefore having Mojave as the operating system I bought the new Parallels version 14, a disaster!!!!!!!!!

My virtual machines were mainly windows machines, like WindowsXP - Seven ect ect, and then I had a virtual machine with macOS High Sierra where I worked in graphics with Illustrator - Photoshop - Dreamweaver ect ect , nothing when I used it seemed to have a 20-year-old PC slow in everything, not to mention the fact that old systems like winXP were unusable as I never managed to find a decent resolution.

However I solved everything with VM Fusion PRO, and therefore Parallels thank you very much for how you treat your customers, ah I want to remind you that there will now be three versions that the capital key does not work on virtual machines, but I see that by now you have become good only at write "known problem we are working on it" ...

you are disappointing!!!!

 

For folks that are still experiencing this slowness, please check your disk and see if you have it set to automatically expand. Back it up first, of course.

My iMac Pro was running Parallels very slow (all of a sudden) until I turned this off. It'll take time to expand the size of the disk, and then you'll be stuck with having a larger disk image file.

 

I had the same problem as you all but I found a solution that worked very well for me. I created a new user account on my Mac. From there I ran Parallels and I noticed that it was very quick and that the Mac side wasn't slowing down anymore. So I'm now using that user account as my main one on my Mac. It was a bit of a pain to get all the configs and files to that one, but the great news is that Windows 10 under Parallels works very well.

 

Coming from the PC world as a developer using Docker. Purchased my first MacBook 16 inch, 32 GB RAM, upgraded 8 GB graphics card among things, and it's quite fast in my opinion. Installed Windows 10 in Parallels 15 (256 GB storage, 16 GB RAM allocated) - realized I needed the pro version to be able to run Docker. Purchased that, installed Windows 10 and Docker, and I must say it's nearly impossible to work with this. It's SO SLOW! Compiling even simple projects in VS Code takes forever (and the MacBook fan is running like an airplane). Browsing this forum I can see I'm far from the only one experiencing this, and I really wonder if there would be any solution on this? I'm not downgrading to an old version of Parallels - that can't be a solution I can live with. Would I really have to create a Hyper-V on a Windows Server with Windows 10 instead? I sincerely hope I'm doing something wrong with my Parallels 15, and that it's just a few options I need to change before I'm able to work with this.

 

I'm a new user of Parallels, currently v15 Trial Version, and I'm astounded at how bad this software is. I'm a Mac user for everything, and have been for years.

Due to an incompatibility issue when using linked workbooks in Excel for Mac the data analyst that I'm collaborating with suggested using Parallels and the Windows versions of Office. Following the Parallels v15 automated/walk-through setup process was not simple nor swift.

The performance of Parallels v15, and the Windows VM environment, is staggeringly bad. My desktop is a 21" iMac, 3.1Ghz i7, 16Gb RAM, 1TB Fusion Drive (>700GB available).

Excel is completely unusable. Even trying to click from one cell to another, without making any edits, is impossible. I went for a cycle ride while I was waiting for the cell navigation to be processed, and after 90 minutes (no joke) the status of this task was displayed as "calculating...11%".

Inserting a new line in a worksheet. After 20 minutes Excel is still "calculating (2 Threads) 47%" and the only workable outcome is to close the workbook and try again. Repeat; fail; repeat; fail.

OS X Activity Monitor shows that Windows VM is consuming between 400% (when VM is active but when no Office Apps are running) and 775% (when Office Apps are live) of CPU.

I have read the Parallels guidance regarding the recommended settings for allocation of CPU cores, allocation of RAM in 1024 multiples, etc, and made sure that these settings are in place.

I have booked a live online technical support session but at this stage my first, and enduring, impression of Parallels is "garbage".

 

had similar problem, thought it might be 32 bit v. 64 bit or graphics. no meaningful change. got tech support today - immediately removed parallels toolbox (not tools) and immediately became as fast as before. no explanation as to why nor whether it's Catalina or changing from 14 to 15 or whatever, just that if you do not use it, remove it. when looking at the mac cpu use, there were 10+ applications from toolbox using memory. even the mac side was faster. hope this helps someone and if anyone has any insight, please post.

 

FYI: The latest Parallels v15.1.4 works fine on MacOS Catalina v10.15.4 host with Ubuntu 20.04 guest. However, the problem still persists on Ubuntu 16.04 guest. So I just upgraded my guest vm. Hope this helps.

 

Thank you marcr12. My Excel on Windows suddenly got so slow is was nearly unusable fairly recently. Deleting ToolBox appears to have fixed it. Don't know if I ever would have figured out ToolBox was the problem.

 

I think it's fair to say this year's release has been a complete car crash. Parallels need to do better. I reported this slow performance problem to them months ago. Their response was to DECREASE the amount of CPU's and RAM....? I'm on the new MBP 16, 8 CPU cores and 64GB RAM. So naturally, after upgrading from my old 4 core 16GB MBP, I bumped up my Windows 10 VM spec from 4 cores and 8GB RAM to 8 cores with 32GB RAM. This VM should be flying. But it doesn't. I can't even run WSL2 properly. It makes the VM unusably slow. The worst part is the bootup. After logging into Windows its probably a good 5 minutes or so before the VM is usable. In the Activity Monitor in macOS the CPU usage for the Windows 10 VM is running at 800%! The macOS side still works flawlessly at this point though and there is no noticeable performance drop. After Windows has been running for 5 - 10 minutes it becomes usable but still clunky at times and certainly doesn't feel like I have a VM that is twice as powerful with 4x the amount of RAM, compared to the old spec.

I humoured the support agent and lowered the spec as he suggested. It just made the problem worse though.