Sub-par performance on Desktop 7 & Lion?

M

MelvinnL

Bit poster
Hi all,

Appreciate if you guys can share your experience if you have fairly similar setup. I seems to be experiencing exceptionally slow performance after I've upgraded to Lion and then Parallels Desktop 7.

I have OSX Lion on my MacBook Pro Core i7 (2.66GHz) with 8GB RAM. Was running version 6 (Windows 7 Ultimate) with so-so performance but read that version 7 boasts better overall performance, especially in the area of graphics. I upgraded to version 7 yesterday and initial performance is not encouraging.

Problem is, typical benchmarks like PCMark7 yielded DirectX9 3D speeds at single-digit frame rates and max out at only 13fps (still very patchy animation) after a lot of tweaking. Windows Experience Index (Control Panel/System) yielded less than 3 scores for both 2D & 3D graphics.

Tried different VM configurations, from 1CPU to 4CPUs (best), memory from 2GB to 4GB and video RAM from 256MB to 1GB; things (display specs went from single-digit to 13+fps with video ram set at 1GB).

So where are all the claimed speed advantage of version 7?

Do share your system and Desktop configuration settings and throughput figures that you can achieve.

Thanks & regards,
Mel
 
Same

I have a new 15" macbook pro. I moved from a 4 1/2 year old core duo MBP with 4GB of Ram running snow leopard and parallels 5 to the new laptop running lion and 7. I have 4GB RAM. Don't know whether it is more memory hungry or not but the performance on the new machine is simply not as good
 
Lion has problems on mid 2010 MacBook Pros and drivers for the NVIDIA 330 card used for discrete graphics (that is what I have, oh joy). I find my MBP is more stable than some and if I boot or reboot then games and Parallels runs fine. If I let my MBP sleep then upon waking things either run fine, or the entire system is slow as molasses (well, anything that uses a lot of graphics processing). My WiFi is also iffy after sleeping sometimes (another known issue).

From the Windows experts at Microsoft I've been told that when Windows Vista or 7 finds "new hardware" (as a new version of Parallels will appear to be) there are background tasks that run to clean up/optimize Windows for the new hardware. While those processes are running performance takes a hit. It's recommended to leave Windows up and running for a couple of hours so that things can settle down before optimal performance will be achieved.

To maximize my Windows performance here is my setup. I have 8 Gb RAM now (when I only had 4 Gb I could not give Windows more than 1 Gb or everything slowed down). Hardware 4 CPU, memory 2 Gb (I can use 4 Gb but want to leave RAM for Fedora running on Parallels also). Options Optimization Performance "Faster virtual machine", enable hypervisor checked, tune windows for speed checked. Backup "do not backup virtual machine" checked - Time Machine can kill Parallels performance if it's backing up the files Parallels is using. I would also specifically exclude your virtual hard disk from Time Machine using the Time Machine's preferences.

Full screen - adjust Mac screen resolution (otherwise the emulation has to scale Windows up or down to fit your Mac's resolution which takes graphics processing from other tasks.

Video - I set it to 512 MB, could use 1 Gb but really found no increase speed for what I was doing and it seemed to slow down Aperture when I gave too much memory to the emulation. You can use 1 Gb if you need to but it may affect the Mac's performance if you are doing graphic intensive things on the Mac side.

Enable 3D acceleration - checked

Enable vertical synchronization - checked. I don't think this is essential with an LCD display but it seemed to help with some artifacts I saw with some games (perhaps that is all in my head).

Windowed or Full Screen mode is faster for games than Coherence or Crystal.

Your mileage may vary but these setting seem to work pretty well for me.
 
I've had similar performance issues with Parallels 7 on Lion with Windows 7 Ultimate. Things were fantastic, FANTASTIC on Parallels 6 & Snow Leopard with the same VM. Now, things run hot (then slow), the network doesn't like resuming after sleep, the VM needs constant reboots to fix quirks with rendering MSN Live and I'm considering an alternate product.

I'm running a 2011 15" MBP, i7, 8GB ram & OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS. I feel like the issue isn't the hardware...

I feel like making a new Windows 7 VM from scratch, but that seems unnecessary, the VM ran fine with Parallels 6...
 
improve Mac speed

Hi there!

The Mac system is widely used today for the purpose of both business as well as individual task. But, with the use of system for number of tasks sometime the speed of system slows down due to some reasons such as full memory space, hot processor, number of apps set to run on startup, etc. To enhance the processing speed user can do following things:
Clean not required codes.
Remove unnecessary languages and translations.
Clean Other System Preferences.
Clean Startup items.
Clean hard drive.
(http://lowendmac.com/eubanks/07/0312.html)

Also, if user don't want to waste too much time and need quick speedup of the system then the third party tool is very helpful.
Source: http://www.improvemacspeed.com
 
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