WindowsXP as Guest very slow, while showing heavy HDD activity !

M

Marc1000

Bit poster
I'm using Parallels Desktop on my apple notebook and I'm so pleased with its performance, that I like to use it on my Windows XP desktop also.

I've downloaded the latest version 2.2, Build 2112 of Parallels Workstation and got an evaluation key.

My PC is:

Dell Dimension 9200
Intel Core 2 CPU 6600, 2,4 GHz
2 GB Ram
640 GB HDD, Raid 0
Nvidia 7900 GS Graphic card
Windows XP, SP2, all updates

While my PC is quite good equipped, the guest operating system (Windows XP 2) runs quite slow, showing heavy hdd access while working.

I've tried a lot of settings to narrow the problem, and here is what I found out:

The VM runs good and fast, if I set it up with 256 MB RAM. If I increase the memory of the same VM to 512, problems are starting. First of all, the Windows XP Starting Sound loops and is somehow broken.

If I start some picture processing, I very soon come to a point, where every action (like moving a window) will result in about 3 to 4 second heavy HDD activity, while the guest OS freezes. Then the OS will resume for some seconds and I have the same effect.

While this HDD activity, the VM status bar shows NO HDD access at all. I would guess, that this is a sign of some memory swapping somewhere.

I tried to switch off virtual memory on both, primary AND target OS, without any change in behaviour.

Then I've put the VM files on an external USB HDD, while keeping the 'Default directory for virtual machines' on my local drive.

Those mentioned hdd activity only takes place on my local drive, NOT on the external, where the VM's HDD drive images are. This shows, that the access occurs to that 'pvs.tmp' file, that is always created in the default directory for virtual machines when ever I open a VM.

So I guess the problem is that 'virtual memory' handling to the file 'pvsXX.tmp'. I can't see, why such a file is used, if the host has 2GB of RAM and the VM just uses 512 KB. Further this seems not to happen on an other PC, that has only 1GB of RAM installed:

AMD Athlon 2700XP
1 GB Ram
160 GB HDD
Windows XP, SP 2

I transfered the same VM to this PC. No problems at all, with 256MB or 512 MB memory settings.

Any hint, what I can do ?

Further I received some 'Virtual hard disk cannot be written. Taget host disk full.' errors, which I answer with 'Retry' with no further problems. (What ever the problem here may be, it is not harddisk space as there are about 80GB still free on that drive.). This is the only application ever having any problem with my harddisk. (RAID problem ?)

I would realy like to use Parallels Workstation for my PCs, but with the current behaviour the tool is unusable.

Are there any known problems with PCs having 2 GB Ram, or a RAID 0 HDD ?

Regards

Markus Rahlff
 
Same issue

I have the same problem with Ubuntu Feisty as host and Windows 2000 as guest.

Has there been a resolution?
 
Me too! I recently added a second gigabyte memory card to my machine that runs Gentoo as the host with an XP guest. The XP performance was terrible. It took many minutes to open a applications such as Quicken and then was still unusable. Much hard drive thrashing. I tried several variations of guest memory size to no avail.

A few minutes ago I removed the second memory card (back to 1 GB) and the performance problems disappeared.
 
Thank you for reporting these problem with Parallels Workstation, we'll surely fix them in the next update. Please mind that our developers are working hard on the virtualization code and PC and Mac branches are not so different, so after we get the things done with the incoming Mac version update - Workstation is getting some loving too :)
I can't give any details yet, but you can be sure that we are doing our best to keep both PC and Mac versions on-par, thus delivering the award-winning virtualization technology to both platforms :cool:

Also, regarding the current issue with the strange .tmp file behavior - have you tried moving the Windows temp files folder to another HDD/partition? It can be done from Start - Control Panel - System - Advanced - Environment Variables, edit the "TMP" and "TEMP" paths there.
 
So glad to hear from you

Hallo,

Its so good to hear from some of you guys.

I belive you are working hard, but I have a very seriuos bug here, which should get some urgent attention.

Its seems to be that simple:

If you host is running under Windows XP und has 2 Gig of Memory, the VMWare seems to start memory swapping to it's temporary disk file.

The problem is NOT the RAM size of the virtual machine, but of the HOST !

The same vm is running on an 1 GB system and does lots of swapping on a 2 GB system.

I would not exspect any swapping at all if I run a 512 MB VM on a 2 GB host.

If I must guess, I would say, that you have some problem with your VM's swapping module, which seems to get the host's real memory size somehow wrong. ( int overrun ?)

Did you aver test this on a 2GB Host system ?

Regards

Marc

P.S. I have moved my windows tmp file, but the problem is the parallels tmp file. Why is there any swapping at all? The same vm does not do any swapping running on a 1GB system.
 
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spectre said:
PC and Mac branches are not so different
Click to expand...
Please don't try to pull the wool over our eyes.

Multiple nics, network sharing, drag and drop, better windowoes installation wizard, more complete usb support, coherence, transporter. They are the things that I know of, and I don't even use Desktop to be able to do a real comparison.
.
 
As I posted above, when I bumped my memory to 2 GB and increased the VM size, severe thrashing killed performance (Athlon 3000+, Gentoo host, XP Pro SP2 guest).

I experimented a bit today with VM size and found that 288-320 MB gives me acceptable performance despite the bug. The XP swap file remained fixed at 384 MB.

At 384 MB VM size and above the thrashing is so severe that the machine is unusable.
 
One more thing on the swapping issues:
Have you checked the "Reserved memory limit" settings in the Parallels Workstation Preferences? The value you set there indicates the total amount of RAM Parallels can take from your host. If total amount of memory needed by the running VM(s) exceeds this value - it begins swapping.
So, for example, if you want to run two VMs with 512MB RAM allocated to each simultaneously, you should have "Reserved memory limit" at 1024MB at least (1196-1280 is better, to have some failsafe margin). If you added more memory to the host - please increase the reserved limit accordingly, generally it's good idea to keep it at maximum.

constant,

I was speaking about similarities in the code both for Desktop and Workstation, so if we have some feature or functionality in Desktop - it's easier to implement it in Workstation than just writing the code anew. I've already said that Workstation will get all the Desktop functionality with the future updates.
 
I've already said that Workstation will get all the Desktop functionality with the future updates.
Click to expand...

By the time you get the next windows/linux version out you will only have mac customers left!

Vmware server is free and out performs parallels by a wide margin! I still use parallels with a linux host and windows xp guest but without parallels tools for linux, a linux guest is hopeless!

don
 
spectre said:
One more thing on the swapping issues:
Have you checked the "Reserved memory limit" settings in the Parallels Workstation Preferences? The value you set there indicates the total amount of RAM Parallels can take from your host. If total amount of memory needed by the running VM(s) exceeds this value - it begins swapping.
Click to expand...

Whoops! My reserved memory was set to 256MB. I increased that to the maximum allowed (568 MB) and was able to run a 512 MB VM with XP. I settled on 448 MB because just a bit of Linux swap gets used on startup of a 512 MB VM.

For a test, I set the reserved memory back to 256 MB and started the 448 MB VM. The boot was quite slow but no Linux swap was used (not one byte). After booting, I C-A-D'd to start the Task Mgr. to watch the swap activity and then started Quicken. For several minutes CPU usage was mostly at 100% and still no Linux swap used. The Windows paging increase was the same 20-30MB as with a properly sized reserve memory. What I observed doesn't agree with what you say should have happened.
 
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spectre said:
I've already said that Workstation will get all the Desktop functionality with the future updates.
Click to expand...
Well aware of that. It's been said since October 2006.

That's when the update was coming Q1 2007. Now it's Q4 2007, which is a very Microsoft like commitment.
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