Slow resume after reboot

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Parallels User

Hi,

I have a Win XP vm in Parallels 5. It works well and I would normally suspend and resume it. If I suspend and resume it while my MBP is still on everything is fine and it comes up again in a few seconds. But if I suspend it and shutdown the Mac or do a reboot the next resuming goes up fast to 60 % and then stucks there for a few minutes. After that time, the vm comes up. This procedure takes longer than booting new in Win XP, so for me suspend/resume is useless.

Can anyone help me to resume the machine faster after a reboot?
 
Hello,

I have the exact same problem. I am currently emailing with Parallels support about it, but they have not been helpful thus far. The most recently response said essentially that this is expected behavior. As you say, it makes suspending somewhat useless.

My memory is that this did not happen in previous versions of Parallels. Can you (or anyone else) confirm?

Ben
 
Here's the final word from Parallels:

The behavior you are facing with is really expected. I have just tested it on several Macs in our labs with several virtual machines and it also takes the biggest part of time at 60% resuming. When you ran previous versions of Parallels Desktop it have not take so much time because of many reasons: your virtual hard drive was not so big, you have not installed some new applications, etc)

Anyway, you do not have reasons to worry Parallels is working just as expected for you and I do not think that 1 minute and 30 seconds is a long time for resuming.
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And my response.

Thanks for your email. And thanks for testing in your lab; I think what you’ve proven is that this is a consistent issue with Parallels 5, but that doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable.

I don’t know if you keep old versions running in your lab, but I’d recommend that you try a boot and resume in Parallels 3 and 4. I have no way to test this, but my memory is that it was much closer to a normal resume.

This makes Parallels much less useful for me. I don’t use Windows all day, or even every day — I just jump in from time to time for a few minutes. This issue makes that impossible.

I’m going to be looking at competing products and considering a switch. I’m also going to suggest that Macworld and TUAW cover this issue.
Click to expand...
 
Update: Parallels is now acknowledging that this is a problem. Resume after boot is apparently supposed to be slower but not that slow. My issue was kicked up to a second-level support person, who logged onto my machine remotely and didn't find any obvious reason for the problem. He is going to take it to the developers. Stay tuned.
 
Hi Ben,

I´ve been on vacation the last weeks. I made the same experience - support says there´s nothing wrong, but fact is Parallels competitor needs 20 seconds for resuming the same machine (we tried that out on a friends Mac after converting it) and in Parallels it lasts for almost three minutes on my MBP. That did not happen in former versions of Parallels as I have a license since Parallels 3.0.

So hopefully they fix it again in one of the next updates.

gradkal
 
Here's the latest (and presumably final) word from Parallels:

We have got a reply from our development team:

Last report shows that this virtual machine has 8GB of memory. It can't be resumed fast, when guest OS actively uses memory.
Particularly for this Virtual Machine 2,7GB of HOST memory is preallocated during resume (please note, not all 8GB). This
is done because we have detected that these memory pages are active and are in use by the guest operation
system. This is done to make Virtual Machine responsive right after resume completes and not doing this preallocation will
lead to significantly longer time of awaking the VM. All this data is read from host HDD. Assuming the speed
of reading to be near 30 MB/sec reading 2,7 GB from HDD will take about 100 sec. As I can see from log:
16:02:44.526 F /vm:268:6a03/ Started pages preload...
...
[PpLockGuestMem] Finished Preloaded 2754 MB (705024 of 2097152 pages)
...
16:03:55.664 F /vm:268:6a03/ Started pages preload...OK

actually this operation lasts a bit longer (130 sec) and it is not a surprising thing because speed can
easily be 25 MB/sec for example.

All that can be done here to speed up this operation is to use compressed memory images for suspend/resume
and this feature is implemented in Parallels Desktop 6. Using more faster HDD as a VM storage will also speed up the
operation.

As a result we can see that resuming VM with such huge amount of memory can't take less time now due to objective reason.

Also you can try to reduce memory allocated to this virtual machine and check how long would resume takes in this case.
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I tried reducing the size of my virtual machine to the minimum recommended, and it did speed up the resume after boot, to about 36 seconds.

It's true that while the resume was faster in previous versions of Parallels, at least for me, it was pretty balking for a while thereafter. Now it takes a long time to resume but it works perfectly as soon as it is done resuming.

One thing here that is somewhat maddening is that they apparently have some new idea for speeding things up -- but it won't be in a free update.
 
I also tried out to reduce the memory for the virtual machine and indeed it resumes faster with this measure. On the other hand my impression is that with the minimum memory the vm is getting terribly slow. My vm is comparatively big (35g) because a lot of business apps are still not available for Macs, so working with less memory is not the solution for me.

Apart from this slow resuming Parallels is the best Mac virtualization software by far. So I´m hoping for improvement in Parallels 6.
 
gradkal said:
Apart from this slow resuming Parallels is the best Mac virtualization software by far. So I´m hoping for improvement in Parallels 6.
Click to expand...

I think you need to give the "other guys" a try before you make this comment.

The slow resume is enough to jump ship IMHO. Although Ben mentioned NOT having this issue in version 4...I did and the reason I upgraded was hoping for this fix.

My host system is 12 Gb and I've tried every combination of memory and OS (XP SP3, Server 2003 R2, Win7) and they all have this issue with resume...and it occurs more the longer the guest system is sleeping in my experience.

Based on my comments I should have had a response from the Parallels team and free upgrades from 4 to 5 and 5 to 6 for my issues...but not...
 
I do experience the same issue. I've also tried all combination of hardware config, different memory size, different numbers of CPU cores, enable/disable Adaptive Hypervisor. All gives me more than 10 mins resume time after reboot. I'm running Win7 64bit on the previous gen i5 macbook pro with Parallel 6 with latest updates.

This is a serious bug Parallel has. I hope they will fix this issue asap.
 
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