Successful Compression! (39GB->12GB in 4 days)

Yes, I was finally patient enough to let Compressor run to completion. After disk defrag it took a 39GB Windows XP installation image and compressed it down to 12GB. It seems to be running fine with no side effects of missing apps, components or files.

But it took almost 4 days to accomplish on my MacPro Quad 2GHZ with 3GB of RAM and 500GB RAID0 using Parallels 3.0, build 4560! During that time I used the machine minimally and quit all apps that I absolutely didn't need running.

4 days?!? WTF? I could have sequenced the human genome in that time. Is this POS written in Java or something?

 

Ha ha... Well get sequencing! (Just kidding...)

I wonder if it's written using the same technology that does snapshots? I posted a thread about how slow snapshot deletion was...

I had only 4 snapshots and decided to save space by deleting the ones I knew I wouldn't need again. Each deletion took close to 20 minutes. My VM was a 20gb disk.

A number of people tried to argue that this was a complex operation and lots of comparisons would need to be made to delete snapshots from the middle of the chain. I lost my trust of them and started deleting from the tail as suggested by one user and it still took close to 25 minutes per delete.

I went back to simply copying and maintaining archived versions of my VM directory on an external disk. It actually takes LESS time to do this than it does to use snapshots. My copies to a firewire disk take 12-14 minutes, removing a no longer needed archive takes 3 seconds (including trash empty). This is much better than 25 minutes for snapshots.

Perhaps they use the same methods?

M

 

POS Indeed!

To whom it should concern:

I am not sure why they picked the name Parallels, but I suspect it is because this Compressor on the Mac must have been written by programmers in some parallel universe or something.

I attempted to try to use it to compress down an 80GB HDD (which had 15GB of space used therein), and it ran for almost 48 hours, with nothing more than a status bar that had not moved. Thus, I stopped it, thinking something was horribly wrong. Alas, I can see that I just wasnt patient enough, and I should have been willing to wait for 2 weeks or something (given a 39GB HD, with 12GB free took 4 days, I am thinking an 80GB hd with 15GB in use should take at least 8-10 days)!!!

I have to admit, I tend to lean to the side of el-cheapo off-shore programmers being the problem here. But, hey, thats just a random guess that some low-budget Russian programmer is to blame here (nothing against Russians, I am one myself, just low-budget programmers).

First, if it is going to take this long then you need to give people a far better and more realistic status bar, or you have no idea if it just hung or is screwed up or what. If it is going to take 500 hours to complete, then you need estimate that and tell people!!!

Secondly, I have to wonder why it takes so long, if this is bugulant software, or if doing this sort of rearrangement in a virtual environment really just does take this long. If the later is indeed the case, then someone needs make note of this in the documenation or screens that pop up while its running!

I am curious, if I take Partition Magic and reduce the partition size (of Windows) down to 20GB, leave 60GB "unallocated" to any partition, and re-run compressor, will it complete faster?

Please someone in the Parallels Universe tell us why this is becoming occurrent, and what kind of expectations we need to have in performing such a mega-crunch of space?

Some guy that demo'ed the software.

 

Ok I finally got up off the floor from laughing so hard... "Programmers in a Parallel universe..." and "el-cheapo offshore programmers..." Very good.

Ok I believe that Parallels have achieved some technically great stuff. I've been nerding for 30 years and wouldn't have a clue where to start with virtualization and I've spent many hours in assembly and I'm quite comfortable with processors, instructions, blocks, memory, etc. Still virtualization is pretty cool stuff.

But you add to something that really concerns me. It appears that the data being stored in the Parallels VM files is either extremely poorly organized or perhaps as you say is really complex enough to require 4 days worth of compression.

My first experience with this behavior having never used the compressor before was in the use of the much requested and touted feature: Snapshots. This seemed like a great idea. Anytime you have a stable environment and you want to install something questionable you snapshot it, it saves everything to disk and then you install. If you don't like it you revert back. Cool idea eh?

Well I made 4 snap snots. One was a base "good base". I then made another before I installed some piece of software. A few days later I made another one. I had a total of 4 snapshots and I was running out of diskspace. So I decided to delete the ones I no longer needed. I picked 2 and 3. I wanted my good base. I wanted my last one. So I told the snapshot manager to delete 3.

That took over 15 minutes... Progress wheel and nothing for 15 minutes. I figured I was hosed. I was about to pull the plug when it finally came back to life. I was so nervous I let the snapshot number 2 stay put. A week or so later I figured ok... disk space is critical again, I'm not busy I'll try deleting 2. That one took 25 minutes.

I bit the bullet and deleted all of them at that same time and was unable to use Parallels for over an hour while it crunched, grinded, and did whatever it had to do. No idea what it was doing either.

I posted a note on the forum hear and several "users" said this was to be expected because of all the merging that had to be done when deleting snapshots from the middle. That may very well be true but it made the snapshot feature TOTALLY UNUSABLE because in my humble opinion I was doing what I figured MOST users would do.

I surely cannot afford 25 minutes of down time to remove a known bad version.

I was told again by users that the "tip" snapshot delete should be fast. So I tried an experiment. I created a new snapshot then simply tried to delete it. It took well over 10 minutes and this was the tip snapshot.

My VM was only 20gb. I can back it up to a fireware disk in 8 minutes. Why should I use snapshots when I can do the job with much more assurance that nothing will go south (full copies versus, merging etc)?

Anyway this combined with your experience leads me to believe that the file structure, methods, organization of the VMs is not easily dealt with when trying to merge, compact or do other file operations on it.

M

 

5160 is lightning fast in compressing. 45 GB down to 13GB in 4 hours.

 

Lightening fast, ay?

Well, I ran the "compact" option under Parallels for an 80GB hdd with about 15GB used in it, and it ran for 45 minutes! After which the hdd was EXACTLY the same size it was before this process started!

The problem as I see is it is that "lightening never strikes twice"...and well...hence I am expecting this darn compressor to run for a fortnight!

There is no possible way that this process takes this long normatively. I am quite sure that despite all of the other successful functionality incorporated into Parallels, the Compressor software is "bugulant en masse".

I have to admit that given the overwhelming excellent quality of the rest of the product, it was rather surprising to see how terrible the compressor and compact functions work.


Stuart

 

To follow up on compression time.

I created a new VM on my Mac using all of the (recommended) steps, and selected Windows XP Home (64 bit) - I didn't know there was such a thing, but because my Mac is an intel core 2 duo, I figured what the heck and selected the 64 bit over the 32 bit option. This was a bit confusing. These recommended steps resulted in a Windows 30GB HD as seen in Windows.

I then installed Windows, all of my required software and data. However in the process I had to install software related to my network printer (HP 2840). This software when installed really only adds 222MB of required disk space, but in the process it creates a folder with an additional 1.5GB of install files folders and data. Usually a Windows install application uses the Temp file, but not this one.

At this point prior to cleaning up that goofy file and deleting all of my .tmp files and other junk that windows puts in there, I was able to reduce my required size from 13.5GB down to 7.2GB of the 30GB as seen by Windows.

When I looked at my VM it showed a file size of 13.5GB so I decided to do Compression.

45 minutes later all done and I now stand with 7.22GB for my VM. This was fantastic.

Now we get to where things changed a lot using the Compressor!

The reason for all of this is that I had a Windows VM that I set up about a year ago when I first migrated from Windows to the Mac environment. Of course at that time I had no idea how the Mac worked or how Parallels worked. For that matter I am still learning.

Anyway, what I had there was a 60GB VM within which I created 3 partions using Partition Magic. I re-created my file structure within the VM exactly as it was on the PC. I had my main C drive, E drive for photos (a ton of them) and my F drive for data. In total I probably used about 45 to 50 GB of my total 60GB Windows structure.

Of course being on the Mac I moved all of my Photos over to the Mac, and managed to clean up my data drive substantially (you know how you just collect junk over time). The bottom line is that I now only require about 13GB for my Windows environmnet, and even that will be reduced in time as I start using the Mac the way it should be used.

Because I was able to empty the Photos partition and move all of my required data over to C drive, I ran Partion Magic again and ended up with a single C drive. Now without going into this, the rebuild with Partition Magic didn't go all that smooth, however I finally got there, or at least I thought I had.

Now for Compression:

I did my first compression about a week ago, started in the morning at about 8:30am and it was finished by 10:00pm, however the result was not as expected, and I ended up with a 33GB VM.

I now went in and used Partition Magic again and found that I still had a C and E drive. Oh well, let's do it again. I finally got it to show as a single drive.

Compress again. I started compression at 10:30am yesterday and it's now 9:18 showing a size on disk of 21.64GB. By my estimation it should be finished by about midnight or perhaps 2:00am tomorrow.

It's running at exactly 509MB per hour.

Conclusion:

The first compression with the new VM took only 45 minutes because it started out as a clean install with little or any framentation.

The second VM, because of the fact that it's almost a year old is heavily fragmented on the Mac with pieces of it scattered all over the place. Those bits and pieces are probably all deleted, but all of that junk has to be sorted out and repositioned into a compact location.

Question:

Once this VM is compacted, and if I maintain compaction on a periodic basis (say once a week, or once a month), will the process still require days to complete, or perhaps just an hour or two? I hope it's the latter.

I have my VM set to 640MB of RAM. Would it perform better at the full 2GB that I have available? In other words, dedicate all of my ram to the VM just for the Compression procedure.

The above are my observations, and if anyone should have anything to add to this it would sure be great to hear from you.

Sorry to be so wordy!

 

I'm jealous!!! Day 5, still waiting.

Hi all,

I guess I haven't been quite so lucky... after reading this thread and bracing myself for a long compression, I am now into DAY 5, and it's still churning (progress indicator is sitting at 'Prepare to compact disk(s)' )... CPU usage is running consistently at 100% with occasional dips, with no other programs running, so I presume it's doing SOMETHING. Needless to say, my patience is wearing very thin.

Specs: MacBook Pro, 2.16 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB RAM (1024 MB dedicated to VM), 29.2 GB Total VM HD, 10.5 GB currently free; Parallels Desktop build 5582, running under Leopard.

Sometime back, I did expand the size of my VM disk to give myself more room (as Windows cheerfully maxed out the 20GB I had originally set aside). I wonder if this has something to do with the drawn out compression process?

Given some of the other posts on this topic, I don't think it entirely irrational to expect that it should have finished by now. Anybody care to suggest where I might be wrong? I'd love the pep-talk! The temptation to hit the 'Cancel' button is getting very difficult to resist... even this far in.

Don't get me wrong: I LOVE Parallels, but this is both frustrating and very disappointing. I don't know enough about code to speculate as to how VM data is structured or how the software is written, but I certainly expect better than this from a commercial product.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated.
Chris

PS. Happy New Year, everybody!

 

I would personally cancel the process and try again later. If you are at "Preparing to compact disk" after 5 days then either you have a massive amount of temp file, your VM disk is very badly fragmented, etc.

5582 should be fast and has been for me and my VM disk is set for 100GB. I currently use 20 GB of space for it even after compressing it many times.

 

Thanks for the advice, gegervision. I actually cancelled the compaction late last night, as I suspected 5 days was an indication of something seriously out of whack. I think I'll just rebuild the VM this weekend... it's about due for a scrape anyway.

Cheers!
Chris

 

Update. Success! (sort of)

Just wanted to follow up to my previous posts:

I rebuilt my VM from the ground up (which really needed to be done anyway) and once I got the system set up and all my software installed, ran Compressor, largely out of curiosity.

At this point, my VM is significantly smaller to begin with (something like 13 GB with room to expand to 32). Also, it's a clean system, free of any funkiness I may have created when I resized my old VM.

From end to end, Compressor took a little less than 3 1/2 hours, including full defrag. Beats the hell out of 5 days hung on 'Prepare to compact...'

I can now comfortably attest that under relatively ordinary circumstances, Compressor works quite well, with satisfactory speed.

Cheers!
Chris

 

interesting thread

I just clone my VM every 7 or 14 days

I use the windows live tool to clean it up first
PC Health
http://onecare.live.com/

since I started running my VM from external drives size is not an issue

regards

Hugh W

 

You run your VM on an external HD? Cool! USB, Firewire or other? Do you notice any sort of performance lag? Also, doesn't cloning your VM run you into activation issues with Microsoft, etc?

C

 

I know that this is an old thread, but, that 4 day time is complete bullsh*t. That is completely unacceptable as a company to release something that is so inefficient and puts such a drag on even the best Macs. Fusion can compress the VM in about 10 minutes, why the hell does it take so long for your program? I've been trying to compress a 12 GB installation and I left it on all night and saw absolutely no process. Now, the VM just keeps getting larger - it's only been on this morning for an hour and already grown by about 2 GB.

And, I also saw a comment while looking for help here from an employee where they said that Compressor is a "free utility" and basically said that we were lucky that you've even provided it to us. I work at a software company (www.fattail.com) my friend, that is the most unprofessional response I've ever seen in my life. Because it's free does not mean it can be sucktacular and half-assed. We provide many features to most of our clients for free and they all work. Here's something you should integrate into your corporate culture - if it's not ready, do not release it.

There is absolutely no reason in the world a program should take DAYS to complete something on a file - especially one that is less than 20 GB in size.

 

At this point, my VM is significantly smaller to begin with (something like 13 GB with room to expand to 32). Also, it's a clean system, free of any funkiness I may have created when I resized my old VM. pandora beads

 

I know that this is an old thread, but, that 4 day time is complete bullsh*t. That is completely unacceptable as a company to release something that is so inefficient and puts such a drag on even the best Macs. Fusion can compress the VM in about 10 minutes, why the hell does it take so long for your program? I've been trying to compress a 12 GB installation and I left it on all night and saw absolutely no process. Now, the VM just keeps getting larger - it's only been on this morning for an hour and already grown by about 2 GB.

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