Performance Issues running Vista / Parallels

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darreln

Member
I wanted to get a feel if any other users are seeing performance issues when running a guest OS within Parallels. I am currently running Vista, I have given it 640 Mb RAM (out of 2 Gig) on a MBP 17". I have run this configuration for awhile now, and I have noticed a pretty hefty performance penalty on OS X. Application launches are much slower, and task switching has also been impacted and sometimes it takes 5-10 seconds for the task switcher to even appear on screen. I run MS Office (Mac) through Rosetta, and opening Excel for example, has taken upwards of 45 seconds. Performance "inside" the vm seems to be pretty good for Vista, but does not "feel" quick either.

Does the community have any suggestions for improving responsiveness? Is this a CPU or RAM issue? My RAM currently shows:

Wired: 941MB
Active: 567 MB
Inactive: 383 MB
Free: 155 MB

CPU shows the parallels process most of the time in the 60's or 70's when running.

Thanks for any tips or stories of how you perceive performance on your machine.


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:)
 
Start by disabling features you aren't using in your VM. For example, if you don't use sounds or usb inside the VM, disable those. You'll notice CPU consumption drops to varying degrees with each thing you disable. If you don't really "need" coherence, I wouldn't use it. It is a resource hog. Also, disable the option to update the image in the dock. That seems to cause various pause problems.

Unfortunately, while parallels has many, many great features, using all of these features in combination exacts it's toll.

The other thing you could do is turn off as much eye candy in Vista as possible.
 
VTMac said:
Start by disabling features you aren't using in your VM. For example, if you don't use sounds or usb inside the VM, disable those. You'll notice CPU consumption drops to varying degrees with each thing you disable. If you don't really "need" coherence, I wouldn't use it. It is a resource hog. Also, disable the option to update the image in the dock. That seems to cause various pause problems.

Unfortunately, while parallels has many, many great features, using all of these features in combination exacts it's toll.

The other thing you could do is turn off as much eye candy in Vista as possible.
Click to expand...

Thanks, great suggestions.

I do not currently use Coherence, running in a OS window instead. I have autoconnect for the DVD drive and USB devices turned off, but occasionally I need to print so I cannot disable USB altogether.
As you have mentioned, I also knocked down the eye candy stuff to the basics, but not stripped to bare metal ;-)

I am mostly concerned with the toll it exacts on the host OS, and I am wondering if that is due to the CPU usage of the GOS, or if I should consider buying more RAM...

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Very unlikely to be a RAM issue, unless you are running a heavy app set on the OSX side. I much more suspect the pause are the Parallels icon updating in the dock. Disabling that setting may solve pauses for you. And giving upu 60-70% of CPU resources for occasional printing is a pretty heavy toll. That setting is easily turned on, followed by reboot of VM. If you truly only do it once in awhile, I'd go with that method.

You best bet is to turn all the stuff off and get a baseline of minimum resource useage. Then, turn 1 thing on at a time, in order of importance to you, until you either identify the culprit or find a happy medium.

Best luck.
 
Yes, I did turn off the icon updating.

I understand what you are saying regarding the USB portion. I will take your advice and disable USB and report back in what I see.

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VTMAC, you are the man!
after rebooting my VM, and disabling USB altogether, I am happy to report that my average vm CPU usage is now in the 20's ! That's an incredible drop!

Thanks again for the great tips :)

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