Parallels 318 -and- OS X wayyyy slowww when trying to start VM

This seems to be getting worse each day. I am using Parallels to boot my Windows XP BootCamp partition, and when I press start, it beachballs and slows down the ret of my computer to the point where I have to force quit parallels and reboot my machine.

Right now, it took me forever just to post this thread, and the parallels start screen is still stuck with the play button pressed, and cursor turns to beachball when I hover over.

All other apps on mac are affected, slowed down terribly, ESPECIALLY the dock

I have a Macbook Pro Core Duo, OSX 10.4.9, 2gb RAM, 160gb hard drive, 20gb partitioned to boot camp, VM is using 256mb r--

I just had to hard reboot my machine, was trying to open Finder from the dock and OS X froze. Now I'm back up, trying to run my VM again, it's stuck at "Start", the button is pressed in

And now sound from iTunes is TERRIBLY choppy. Luckily Firefox "restore session" brought back all this text I typed, so plus to firefox team I guess. And I just watched this entire sentence type itself out behind me.

Thats how slow my machine is while parallels tries to boot. It's STILL trying to boot.

I kind of want my $80 back.

 

Re-install Mac OS X or Parallels or Windows.

I would re-install Windows.

 

My computer froze after posting this, I had to hard reboot again. Guess I won't be using windows to check my web sites in IE 6, Firefox for PC, and check my Email in Outlook today.

Could this have anything to do with running MAMP? I started running it yesterday AFTER parallels was already running. Now I've got it running BEFORE. This seems to be the only difference to me.

Except for the fact that since 3186, booting from BC has been excruiciatingly slow.

 

But it doesn't even get past this screen: (pretend the play button is pressed in. i'm not going to try booting it now)

 

DIAGNOSIS: it's MAMP. I can't be already running apache/mysql servers when trying to boot parallels. I turned MAMP off and it boots fine. So there's a little note for development people.

 

Don't blame MAMP. I use it here along with Parallels, and it doesn't matter which one I start first -- they both run just fine. iMac Corer 2 Duo, OS X 10.4.9, both MAMP and Parallels at the latest versions.

YMMV ;-)

Rob

 

shutting off MAMP is the only thing I changed and all of a sudden parallels started playing nice... :/

 

Don't blame MAMP and Parallels Desktop

Better give us some more detail about the problem please.
Questions to phazer:
0. What is your Mac?
1. What is the total amount of RAM your Mac has?
2. How much RAM do you provide your VM with? I assume, it's 256MB...
3. What happens if you start MAMP after PD rather than before? Will it slow down the same way?
4. Which version of MAMP do you use? Link to download would be great.

Questions to rstevenson are the same, except for #3 - no need to answer it.

 

iMac Intel Core 2 Duo
OS X 10.4.9
1.5 GB RAM
MAMP 1.4.1
Parallels 3188
CPU temperature 38 degrees C ;-)

Rob

 

Rob,

How much RAM do you give your VM? Thank you for your answers.

 

0. What is your Mac?
Macbook pro Core Duo

1. What is the total amount of RAM your Mac has?
2GB

2. How much RAM do you provide your VM with? I assume, it's 256MB...
256mb

3. What happens if you start MAMP after PD rather than before? Will it slow down the same way?
Starting after parallels does not effect OS X or Parallels in any way

4. Which version of MAMP do you use? Link to download would be great.
1.4.1 : http://www.mamp.info/fileserver.php?id=17

Additional info not asked for:

OS X 10.4.9
Parallels 3188
Windows XP SP2

 

I didn't deliberately set any particular RAM amount, but I see under Configuration that it says 256 MB. That doesn't seem like much, but all I do is run IE to check out my web sites.

Incidentally, I use IE 7 in its native install and the tredosoft.com Multiple IEs thing to also access IE 6, 5.5 and 5.01. Works just fine.

Rob

 

Only thing I foudn in console so far:

Apr 4 09:39:04 PHAZERS_COMPUTER_NAME authexec: executing /Applications/Parallels/Parallels Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/pvsso
Apr 4 09:39:20 PHAZERS_COMPUTER_NAME diskarbitrationd[36]: Parallels [791]:23303 not responding.

 

Thank you. We will definitely try to reproduce and fix the problem.

 

3188 starting massive slow-downs for my system as well. Especially when launching parallels. Occassionally launching win xp or ubuntu the system will take a dump and I'll restart. I moved the vm's to the / to get them out of filevault and that didn't seem to matter. I have also reinstalled parallels to no avail. No big though ...

Worst culprits are when Entourage 2004 and/or Filemaker 8 (both ppc apps) are running..

mbp 2.16, 1gb ram

 

It happened again this morning, MAMP was running, parallels froze my computer, forced a hard reboot, lost some of my work.

 

someone might say "if you know running mamp makes it crash why did you let it happen again"

2 reasons:

1. i forgot mamp was running, just tried to open parallels like normal, and then remembered: "oh shit, mamp"

2. because AFTER parallels is running, i can run MAMP without a problem so I thought maybe it was an anomaly

 

256 MB is way too low for XP unless you're just running Notepad. With MAPM, you've added a Web server, a database engine, a server-side scripting engine and (presumably) a development environment to the mix. Try upping the RAM. 512 MB might get you by if you perform some Windows optimizations, but 768k - 1 GB should be the sweet spot.

With only 256 MB, XP is probably paging itself to death. Since OS X and XP share a common hard drive (meaning the XP disk image is part of OS X's file system), the heavy I/O in XP also creates a bottleneck for OS X.

FYI - I have a Core Duo Mac mini w/2 GB RAM. I run XP under Parallels and I give it 1 GB. I do all my XP dev work (Visual Studio '05, SQL Server, etc.) under virtualization and performance on both sides of the house remains crisp. My virtual disk image is on an external Firewire drive, for a little added performance.

 

I would second the opinion that it is a bottleneck. I have about 768 MB dedicated on our worker computers here (2 GB equipped).

 

try reading my post, because i said it doesn't even start BOOTING windows. when windows is running and THEN i turn on mamp, performance is FINE. so anyway

i just accidentally started parallels from the dock while working and it slowed my whole computer down from just trying to start PARALLELS, not even trying to boot the VM at all.