Poor performance with MS Office

[GiulioB]

Hello,
first of all the framework:
Host: iMacPro 8-core XeonW @3,2GHz, 64Gb DDR4, 1Tb SSD, Radeon ProVega56 8Gb, MacOS HighSierra v. 10.13.2 (17C2120)
Guest: 6 processors w/ adaptive hypervisor (Parallels), 8Gb RAM, 1Gb graphic memory, DirectX10 for 3D-acceleration and vertical sync on, disk capacity 256Gb, Windows 10Pro 64bit 10.0 (16299)
Parallels edition: Desktop 13 for Mac Business Edition v. 13.2.0 (43213)
VM resolution is set to "best for external display" (5120x2880 @60hz, size of text/app/etc 300%)
Microsoft Office: Professional 2013 64bit v. 15.0.4997.1000 for Windows w/ hardware graphics acceleration and subpixel positioning both disabled - planning to upgrade to Office 2016

Excel and Word are running poorly, buggy and sloppy at best.
If the file implies OLE, performance are almost zeroed (is the case of an inserted table or pasted jpeg in Word) or causing an app freeze/crash (is the case of charts in Excel).
Considering HW deploy we're quite baffled by the pitiful results in using mere office docs.
Host side is a charm and the guest OS seems performing as well. It's just Office 2013.

Any word of advice? Thanks.

 

[Arun@Parallels]

Hi @GiulioB , please try repairing Microsoft office and check if that helps.

 

[GiulioB]

Hi Arun,
we've repaired MS Office 2013 Professional 64bit, but we're still experiencing problems.
In particular Excel freezes when switching from a spreadsheet-worksheet to a chart-worksheet (as well as if the file opens directly on a chart worksheet). While new charts seem to be inserted into a spreadsheet-worksheet without problems.
While unresponsive, MS Excel counts for 265 / 30% of CPU and 300Mb of memory.
Another example is Word suffering of artefacts (such in the uploaded screenshot), disappearing when text is highlighted.
Files are XML zipped (.xlsx or .docx).
Previous configuration (iMac NON-Pro and same MacOS, same Parallels 13, same WinOS, same Office) was flawless. The VM on the iMacPro is a clean install, not simply migrated from the previous iMac.

 

[Dmitry Geynisman]

Hello,
first of all the framework:
Host: iMacPro 8-core XeonW @3,2GHz, 64Gb DDR4, 1Tb SSD, Radeon ProVega56 8Gb, MacOS HighSierra v. 10.13.2 (17C2120)
Guest: 6 processors w/ adaptive hypervisor (Parallels), 8Gb RAM, 1Gb graphic memory, DirectX10 for 3D-acceleration and vertical sync on, disk capacity 256Gb, Windows 10Pro 64bit 10.0 (16299)
Parallels edition: Desktop 13 for Mac Business Edition v. 13.2.0 (43213)
VM resolution is set to "best for external display" (5120x2880 @60hz, size of text/app/etc 300%)
Microsoft Office: Professional 2013 64bit v. 15.0.4997.1000 for Windows w/ hardware graphics acceleration and subpixel positioning both disabled - planning to upgrade to Office 2016

Excel and Word are running poorly, buggy and sloppy at best.
If the file implies OLE, performance are almost zeroed (is the case of an inserted table or pasted jpeg in Word) or causing an app freeze/crash (is the case of charts in Excel).
Considering HW deploy we're quite baffled by the pitiful results in using mere office docs.
Host side is a charm and the guest OS seems performing as well. It's just Office 2013.

Any word of advice? Thanks.

Hi @GiulioB, thank you for the detailed explanation, appreciate that. May I wonder why are you using 'best for external displays' for iMac screen? It makes Windows resolution huge thus may lead to system performance impact. Try either to switch to 'Scaled' (or 'Best for Retina') or assign one more Gb of video memory.

 

[GiulioB]

Hi Dmitry,
We set to "Best for external display" because of this post of Yours, about Parallels13 and Retina with Windows 10, in order to have:

more control over scaling factor

and because "Best for external display"

works best staring with Windows 10.

while "Scaled"

being contrasted to native retina apps it appears fuzzy, pixelated, blocky, ugly or you name it

Anyway We gave a try to "Best for Retina display", with no success.

But, when opting for "Scaled", the specific Excel file didn't hung anymore when switching to a chart tab.
So it's proving true that (bold is mine):

Overall, there's no silver bullet. There's no magic to bring DPI scaling to non-supporting applications except for pushing their developers. And the only reliable way to avoid application misbehavior is to run at Scaled resolution and accept fuzziness.

Now the iMacPro runs the VM with Graphics in "Scaled" mode and 2Gb memory - so far so good.

Thanks! 〳 ◉ ͜ʖ ◉ 〵

 

[Dmitry Geynisman]

Hi Dmitry,
We set to "Best for external display" because of this post of Yours, about Parallels13 and Retina with Windows 10, in order to have:

and because "Best for external display"

while "Scaled"


Anyway We gave a try to "Best for Retina display", with no success.

But, when opting for "Scaled", the specific Excel file didn't hung anymore when switching to a chart tab.
So it's proving true that (bold is mine):


Now the iMacPro runs the VM with Graphics in "Scaled" mode and 2Gb memory - so far so good.

Thanks! 〳 ◉ ͜ʖ ◉ 〵

Glad to hear that 'Scaled' works okay, thank you!