PD 13 + Catalina - slow Windows 10 UI issues

I am having this exact same issue. Since Microsoft is no longer supporting Windows 7, which has been working fine, we upgraded to Windows 10 with Parallels 15. Now runs so slow almost not useful. It is not the hardware: iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017); 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7; 64 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 What is the fix?!

 

Hi, did you try steps from this KB article?

 

@Maria@Parallels Thank you! Have been dealing with performance issues ever since I upgraded to Catalina....it seems that step #4 from the KB article you referenced has greatly improved my windows 10 vm's performance. Originally my graphics memory option was set to 512 mb...once I changed it to "Auto" everything started working as it had before the OS upgrade. Hope this helps other people coming to this topic from google.

 

I'm using PD12 and I had the same issue. My Windows 10 VM worked fine on my iMac running High Sierra. I upgrade to a new machine running Catalina and that same Windows 10 VM started running like crap. The whole system seemed to slow down when the VM was running. I have an 8 core i7 based machine with 32 GB of RAM this thing should not be slow but it was painfully slow. Turns out the issue has something to do with running the VM on a mechanical hard drive. I moved the 270 GB VM to an SSD and it runs like a dream. Not sure what the heck is the issue but when the VM running hard drive I can see my read/write speeds go from about 157 MB/s down to like 15 to 20 MB/s. When the VM is running on the SSD the read/write speeds fluctuate between 300 to 450 MB/s depending on when I run the test. Not sure why it works like this in Catilina, it may have something to do with APFS, I don't know. The SSD is formated in APFS but the hard drive is in the older file system. For now I'm just going to role with running from the SSD and considering upgrading to PD15 or maybe 16 later this year. Hope this info helps someone else.

 

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 pu 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.

 

Hi, is anyone still having this issue? I had the same exact issue for a few weeks and was very frustrated, but for some reason I seem to have fixed it completely so I'll share what happened and see if it helps anyone here. To start, I have iMac with MacOS Catalina on latest version, I also have SSD drive with 16GB memory drive. I have PD13 running Windows7, and in the PD settings I originally enabled "Isolate Windows from Mac". After the recent upgrade to Cataline, my Windows7 was running very lagging and is basically unusable. (1) So at first, I tried to run Windows in the Coherence mode. (2) Then PD13 says I need to enable PD13 under the MacOS System Preferences - Security and Privacy - Privacy. (3) So then I went into my Privacy settings, and then you will see a list of options such as Location Services, Contacts, Calendar...etc... (4) But I only enabled "Screen Recording" because I'd still like to keep my Windows separate from my MacOS. And that's all I did. My Windows7 is now running just like before and I am also running it in the Full Screen mode just like before. Hope this helps other people with your Windows10.

 

I had the same problem with PD13 and running Win10 with it. I did NOT isolate Windows from Mac. I followed your steps from above with the difference that in privacy settings PD is enabled in different services but not in Screen Recording. I checked this option, started Win10 in Coherence Modus an it was very fast. Then switching to normal mode and it was still fast. Then I shut down Windows, set the PD option in "Startup" to "like last time" (I don´t know if this is the correct translation, I´m using German language) and started Win10 again (now in normal mode). And - voilá - Windows runs fast again.
Thank you for posting your solution!

 

In my case Parallel Tools were missing. Once I install them Windows is running smoothly.