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

Ah, I knew I was overlooking something. Thx for the explanation!

 

Hello Everybody

I am also experiencing the same problem,
I have latest stable Parallels and running OSX 10.7
Using 2GB of Memory, 1GB for Mac and 1GB for Windows XP SP2,

My system nearly halts the operations when starting Windows VM.
Windows is working Fine

I don't want to use Parallels DiskImage, because i want to run some critical applications in Bootcamp,

Can anybody help me?

 

Anybody got any clues,

 

Defragment. How much empty space do you have on your VM?

 

I start Parallels, I hit the green arrow, I type in my password.

1 minute 9 seconds later I am looking at the Windows XP window telling me to login.

On top of that is the Parallels Tools Initilization window telling me not to touch anything.
That message remains for another 9 minutes.

After it goes away Windows XP Pro functions just fine and can be restarted at will with no holdup.

This is a 17" MacBook Pro with 2 GB ram. 768 meg allocated to Windows.
Parallels is using the bootcamp installation.

 

Hmm... A wait is not uncommon, but that is an awful long wait... How much free disk space do you have? Is your disk heavily fragmented?

 

It is a 15.84 GB NTFS volume.
Used 8.02 GB
Free 7.82 GB
Fragmentation is now 0%

Fresh startup was 8 minutes 50 seconds. Odd thing is according to the Mac Activity Monitor Parallels is hardly hitting the processor for the vast majority of that time. It runs at about 8% cpu spiking to 13% the second before the don't use message goes away. It is like the program is waiting for some process to time out.

On the Windows side it is a lightly used partition. It has Acrobat Pro 8, WordPerfect 12, Office 2007 & Firefox. No add ons or plug ins for anything.

 

Hmm... Do you have any anti-virus software that might be chewing up your processor? What does the task manager have to say?

 

I can't (or at least shouldn't) login into the XP machine until that Parallels tools initialization is finished. None of the XP virus software is running yet. I don't know that you can access the task manager without logging in.

 

Hmm... I'll get back to that.

 

Thanks for that info. My system was slowing to a crawl with 1500 MB allocated, but switching to 800 cleared up the problem. No more slowdowns in Windows or Mac.

 

I'm seeing really slow starts too.

I've just erased and repartitioned my drive, so there should be no fragmentation.

I have 1.5GB RAM, and I'm giving 600MB to Parallels for VM RAM.

When I start Parallels (3188) The entire machine locks (well it seems like it locks, because it takes about 20 seconds to respond to a mouse click). Whilst Parallels is trying to start. Once windows is booting in the VM, everything resumes to normal speed again.

It's just really annoying that I can't use the computer at all, while I'm starting the VM.

I'm guessing that it's a memory allocation / config thing. (like making a bunch of memory wired... OSX has to clear out enough space to make it happen, and the whole thing chugs waiting for the virtual memory to complete it's house keeping)

My 2cents

-matt

 

Is there likely to be a fix anytime in the near future.
I have this issue, too, and am running build 1370 (which does not show this issue) instead of 1388 because of it.
Mac Book Pro 2.33gh 3gb ram. 750 mb to Parallels.

 

Another slow starter

I can also vouch for Parallels to load slowly when I press the play button on XP. As mentioned by others the strange thing is that ActivityMonitor reports less than 20% processor usage.
Normally I load the .PVS file directly, which still takes forever.

I did have MAMP on the machine but never active and has long since been uninstalled.

MacBook 2.16Ghz
2gb RAM
7200RPM HD
512MB to XP

Console mentions the following on boot (not sure if relevant):
1180729732939:Recent-Mini] doPaint took 74ms. ListRow {0,Recent-Mini}
Jun 1 21:31:18 Will-Mac crashdump[2058]: WindowServer crashed
Jun 1 21:31:19 Will-Mac /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock: Failed to create window context device
Jun 1 21:31:19 Will-Mac /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create software delegate.
Jun 1 21:31:20 Will-Mac crashdump[2058]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/WindowServer.crash.log
mork.pl: /Users/willtwilson/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/9iupze6v.default/history.dat: top level: Cannot parse
fcntl error = 45


According to the extra crashreport it would appear that WindowServer crashed due to the following:
Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00019fe4

Upon trying to repeat the error I hit ALT+TAB at some point resulting in the death of the Dock with the following exceptions. Would be happy to upload full files to anyone interested.

fcntl error = 45
Jun 1 21:37:09 Will-Mac crashdump[2066]: Dock crashed

Exception: EXC_ARITHMETIC (0x0003)
Codes: EXC_I386_DIV (divide by zero)

Would be happy to downgrade if I could find the old version 3170 files??