Parallels very slow on Ubuntu

K

Khoji

Member
On a test install of Parallels on Ubuntu I've set up a Windows 2000 virtual machine with Parallels Tools installed. Performance is unusably slow compared to a Windows 2000 VM running on the same machine in VMWare with Windows 2000 as the host, with huge delays for every mouse movement, window move, dialog response and all other OS interaction.

It is a slow, old test machine (Pentium III 1GHz with 720MB of RAM), but the same setup under VMware with Windows 2000 as the host is more than acceptably fast for testing work. Is this Parallels itself or the overheads imposed by virtualizing between Windows and Linux? I'm guessing that it's the latter, because a Linux VM under VMWare with Windows 2000 as the host is equally slow on the same machine.
 
I don't think it is necessairly a Ubuntu issue. I'm using Edgy and have no problems with speed. The Parallels guest is significantly more responsive than with VMware. There are some significant differences to your envirnonment though. I have much newer hardware. I'm also running XP in my guest and not Win2k.
 
I'm using Debian with a self-complied kernel 2.6.17 and do not notice a slowdown that you are experiencing. Since I have a laptop, all of my kernels are modified to work with my hardware. parallels seems much faster than win4lin pro as it doesn't use nearly as much cpu overhead, it actually is negligible at around 2-5% usage. I do think there is one parameter in the kernels that might be responsible for the problems you are experiencing: somewhere in the kernel config you have hz=1000 (the default for 2.6 kernels) whereas mine is set to hz=100 (the default for 2.4 kernels). The reason is that with hz=100, I get less overhead than I do with the hz=1000 parameter and performance seems to be rather smoother.

Whether this plays a part in the performance of Parallels, I don't know. But I do know that it isn't Parallels at fault for the performance issues. Perhaps Parallels might take a look at Apple's kernel and see if they are using the same hz=1000 parameter as well?
 
Nvidia?

FYI, I noticed a marginal improvement in my guest OS responsiveness when I switched my Kubuntu Edgy box to the proprietary Nvidia driver. Things are still pretty slow though...

Also, I tried upgrading the host from 1GB to 2GB of RAM and it didnt seem to make any difference...

-Jason
 
titetanium said:
I'm using Debian with a self-complied kernel 2.6.17 and do not notice a slowdown that you are experiencing. Since I have a laptop, all of my kernels are modified to work with my hardware. parallels seems much faster than win4lin pro as it doesn't use nearly as much cpu overhead, it actually is negligible at around 2-5% usage. I do think there is one parameter in the kernels that might be responsible for the problems you are experiencing: somewhere in the kernel config you have hz=1000 (the default for 2.6 kernels) whereas mine is set to hz=100 (the default for 2.4 kernels). The reason is that with hz=100, I get less overhead than I do with the hz=1000 parameter and performance seems to be rather smoother.

Whether this plays a part in the performance of Parallels, I don't know. But I do know that it isn't Parallels at fault for the performance issues. Perhaps Parallels might take a look at Apple's kernel and see if they are using the same hz=1000 parameter as well?
Click to expand...

In suse 10.2, there is a minimum and maximum slice time, set at 1000 and 40000 uSec. I tried minimum from 1000 to 10000 with no improvement, in fact, it degraded slightly. Then set the max to 300000 uSec, again, it degreaded slightly. I set them back to their original values, (rebooting after each change) and ended up setting the Parallels acceleration to normal from high. This did improve it some (this was posted on another thread).

Still, when I boot up in winxp, the setting computer and user settings takes about 2 minutes, where normally it was almost instantaneously.

Art
 
video drivers drastically improved performance

I'm running Ubuntu Edgy and was having horrible performance. Opening any menus was painful and you could actually see the graphics rendering...very slow.

On some advice above, I downloaded the latest drivers for my video card directly from NVIDIA (at http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_1.0-9755.html) and followed the instructions for using the NVIDIA drivers I found on the ubuntu forums (at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=336412) (as opposed to the package nvidia-glx which didn't recognize my GeForce 7800 GS).

I'm quite impressed with the performance increase. Especially in full screen.

Now if I could only fix the driver startups.....
 
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