Windows 10 - Poor Performance and 100% Disk Usage

[PaulA14]

Hello

With Windows 10 and Parallels 14, I was having MAJOR issues with 100% disk usage from the Windows side. I did all the recommendations from above with NO LUCK.

I even purchase Disk booster from Auslogics and it helped some, but not really.

Then, out of a the blue, I tried something different. I disabled "Expanding Disk" and set my VM disk space size to be big enough for the Windows 10. I was using the "Expanding Disk" feature. This is in the Configure -> Hardware -> Hard Disk section.

Well, guess what. 100% FAST VM Windows 10. OMG, no more issues with 100% disk usage. Yes, Windows Search does cause 100% Disk usage, but NO EFFECT anymore. I don't know if it is a Windows 10 or Parallels issue, but making the disk size normal without expanding did the job.

So, I set all me VM with normal size disk space and turned off "Expanding Disk"

I wanted to share this encase someone else was having issues with slow response from 100% disk usage.

Thanks

This is great!! It has fixed my issues with temporary 5-10 seconds freezes on a Mac running Parallels Desktop 15 with a Windows 10 VM.

 

[AkiraN]

Hello,
I have another idea that disabling sharing OneDrive with Mac on Windows sharing tab in share settings of parallels VM settings.
After this change, it will be much better performance even it still takes bit time for booting up.
I hope this will help you.

 

[LeeM8]

Hi everyone,

QUICK SYNOPSIS: Local Time Machine snapshots were KILLING my VM performance. Deleting them has fixed it.

I was recently plagued by the same issue described in this thread for about two weeks. My Windows 10 VMs (and probably others) were agonizingly slow. Booting up took about 20 minutes. After that, when I would click on a Windows Explorer icon in the Task Bar and it would take 10 to 15 seconds for a window to show up. In Excel, it would take 2 to 3 seconds just to click change the selected cell. Any time I did anything in a VM, my disk usage would peg at 100% for several seconds or minutes, but the throughput would only be something like 0.1Mb/sec to 0.3Mb/sec. Upgrading from Parallels 15 to Paralles 16 did not help, nor did reinstalling the Parallels tools.

After a lot of fruitless troubleshooting and Googling, I randomly did a "First Aid" for my drive in the Disk Utility app. To my surprise, there were 18 snapshots of my Mac hard drive that I was not expecting. Though the First Aid completed with no issues found, I immediately Googled how to delete these snapshots. I found the article titled How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac.
To list the snapshots, open up the Terminal app on your Mac and type the following, then press the Return key to see the snapshots present:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /​

To delete an individual snapshot you can type something like this:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2018-03-01-002010 (You will need to enter your Mac password after pressing Return.)​

Or if you are like me and want all of them gone as fast as possible, type this:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /​

Just for fun, if you already have your About this Mac / Storage display open, you can watch your drive get a few gigs back as the snapshots are deleted.

In retrospect, it appears that the local snapshot system got corrupted and was causing issues when a VM went to access the hard drive.
Hopefully this helps one or two people out there.

 

[RobertA22]

Just had the exact issue described in this thread. 100% disk usage on most current patch level of Windows 10 on PD 16 v16.1.3. Not sure exactly when and why it started, but I think it was around the time of the last PD Tools update. Turning off the "Expanding Disk" option seems to have completely resolved the issue.

 

[Richard U]

LeeM8's fix seems to have worked for me so far... Legend!
Also presumably need to exclude the folder containing the VM images from Time Machine...

 

[Richard U]

Update: as soon as Time Machine created another snapshot it started happening again so I disabled Time Machine altogether.

 

[MarjorieL1]

Hi everyone,

QUICK SYNOPSIS: Local Time Machine snapshots were KILLING my VM performance. Deleting them has fixed it.

I was recently plagued by the same issue described in this thread for about two weeks. My Windows 10 VMs (and probably others) were agonizingly slow. Booting up took about 20 minutes. After that, when I would click on a Windows Explorer icon in the Task Bar and it would take 10 to 15 seconds for a window to show up. In Excel, it would take 2 to 3 seconds just to click change the selected cell. Any time I did anything in a VM, my disk usage would peg at 100% for several seconds or minutes, but the throughput would only be something like 0.1Mb/sec to 0.3Mb/sec. Upgrading from Parallels 15 to Paralles 16 did not help, nor did reinstalling the Parallels tools.

After a lot of fruitless troubleshooting and Googling, I randomly did a "First Aid" for my drive in the Disk Utility app. To my surprise, there were 18 snapshots of my Mac hard drive that I was not expecting. Though the First Aid completed with no issues found, I immediately Googled how to delete these snapshots. I found the article titled How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac.
To list the snapshots, open up the Terminal app on your Mac and type the following, then press the Return key to see the snapshots present:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /​

To delete an individual snapshot you can type something like this:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2018-03-01-002010 (You will need to enter your Mac password after pressing Return.)​

Or if you are like me and want all of them gone as fast as possible, type this:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /​

Just for fun, if you already have your About this Mac / Storage display open, you can watch your drive get a few gigs back as the snapshots are deleted.

In retrospect, it appears that the local snapshot system got corrupted and was causing issues when a VM went to access the hard drive.
Hopefully this helps one or two people out there.

Holy crap, that fixed it! I was having a horrible slowdown in Windows and this fixed it! thank you!