Parallels 4 freeze Activity Monitor!

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Sometimes my Parallels 4.0 (Guest OS=Win XP) on a Mac Book Pro is freezing. At the same time the Activity Monitor is freezing as well and I'm unable to do a "ps ax" in the terminal.
The only thing to do is to close all other applications and do a hard reset (because auf the hanging Parallels and Activity Monitor I'm not abel to logout or restart the machine).
Any ideas?
 
Could be various reasons, try checking the anti-viruses installed (is there any on the Mac side?), also this might happen due to CPU or memory consumption.
To localize the issue I would suggest to disable temporary Shared folders, switch to 1 CPU in Parallels configuration and make sure that no more than half of RAM is allocated to virtual machine.
Otherwise, it might be better to create a ticket in our support line so that we would be able to investigate this more thoroughly.
 
I'll switch to 1 CPU and give it a try.
Is it recommended to use two CPUs on a MacBook Pro (with two real CPUs only) at all?
 
Same symptoms here: VM hangs, System Monitor freezes, as to ps and top in the Terminal. Only resolution is to force the host to restart. Virtual machines runs Windows XP Professional SP3 and is configured with 2 CPUs and 2GB memory. iMac with 4GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.5.6 and Parallels 4.0.3810.

I'll try and configure the VM for 1 CPU.

Erik.
 
VM with 1 CPU seems stable: I haven't had any hangs since I changed the VM configuration.
 
I'm having the same problem with both XP and Linux guests. I have had to power cycle several (greater than 10) times and have needed to restore from timemachine quite a few times.

I'm resetting to 1 CPU and see if that helps.
 
On a Macbook pro (with 4Gb) freezes occur even with 1 CPU, but a *lot* less frequently (at least on mine).

When using 2 CPUs, I get beachballs, and things slow down until a freeze occurs.

With 1 CPU, the freeze (for me) occurs immediatly (no beachball) but infrequently.

From what I understand, reading the apple forums, there may be an issue with the shared video memory on one of the video cards (whether you are using the integrated video or not) in combination with 4 Gb of real memory. So if you use Parallels with something that exersizes the video and memory, you can randomly hit whatever the problem is. (At least for some macbook pros).

And, of course, when a freeze does occur, none of the log files flush, so it is difficult to determine exacly what the problem is. :(
 
Could Parallels come in and fix the problem as so many people have encountered it and my another MacBook is still running V3 pending for this issue being fixed before proceeding to V4!

Any plan/schedule to release another update?

Thanks!
 
Parallels 4.x freezes accessing network service?

Same problem here: VM hangs arbitrarily. Only resolution is to restart system. Virtual machine runs Windows XP Professional SP3 and is configured with 1 CPU and 2GB memory. Running on unibody MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.5.7 . I've tried with three different builds of Parallels 4.x and have the problem. The problem only surfaced for me after installing OS X 10.5.7.

What I'm noticing is the hang appears to occur when Windows attempts to access a network service.
 
I noticed that my WinXP BootCamp VM with 2 CPUs freezes, while my WinXP file-based VM with 1 CPU doesn't freeze. I'll try reconfiguring my BootCamp partition to only use 1 CPU.
 
Same problem here

I'm running Parallel's 4.0 on a new Macbook Pro 17 (3.06 ghz), with 4MB or ram. My VM is running Windows XP 32 bit with two CPU's. XP is either running incredibly slow or freezing at various times. The Windows taskbar takes fifteen or twenty minutes to appear, if it appears at all. When I click on the Windows start button the menu comes up and freezes. Its very frustrating. Does anyone know if there is any "immediately out of the box" phone tech support or do you have to pay for support from the time of purchase on. I'm thinking if I spend a few more bucks, instead of paying Parallels to fix their own product, I can spend a few dollars more and just purchase VM Ware. Then I don't have to worry about getting Parallels to work right period:).
 
Only use 1 CPU, as stated in this thread.

Even with 1 CPU, extreme slowdowns will also occur when running in coherence with graphics intensive applications. Minimizing windows windows you are not using fixes that. I wonder whether this could have to do with OSX memory caching.

Even with 1 CPU, I occasionally experience system freezes, but I think that is a problem with the Macbook Pro itself.
 
There are a lot of people suffering from this Freezing Activity Monitor issue with Parallels Desktop in this and other related threads from the very beginning of PD4 to latest build 3844!

How com it is no action from Parallels teams???
 
Has there ever been a fix?

I am having the same problem. MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz with 4GB memory.

Slowdowns, then hangs, Causes Activity Monitor to freeze. Terminal freezes too.

One additional symptom, that I have reported (with no response). I am not sure if this is related, but if I cut something from XP and paste it into MacOSX 10.5.8, I often get garbage on the end of the paste. Sometimes it is a few bytes long, sometimes hundreds. Random characters, often many null bytes. It is like it does not get the length right.

Also when it starts slowing down, I see prl_vm_app in activity monitor taking 100% and more of the Dual CPUs.
 
Same issue here

It is definitely something to do with the CPU. I had this Activity Monitor freezing issue a few months back and the Parallels support staff had me try out many different things. In the end, what stabilized Parallels was to scale back my CPU to 1 (I have 4 on my mac pro and access to 4 in the parallels VM options). BTW, Parallels worked great for me with 3 or 4 cpus but just wouldn't survive an Apple sleep/wake cycle or manage itself open for long periods of time... memory leak?

Here's what the support person laughably said:

There is no known bug with multiprocessor support in Parallels.

When we allocate more processors to a machine it tends to take lot of processes which eventually slows down the system.

Assigning one processor is sufficient for a Virtual Machine.

Let us know if you have any further queries.

Best Regards,
==============
Mohammed Hashim
Technical Support Engineer
Parallels

interesting.... I think there's been a few updates since that response so I tried the multi CPU setting and the system is now hung and won't allow me to use Activity Monitor nor soft reset.
 
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