Question

Not sure if this has been answered in another thread but i have been having serious performance issues with running an XP VM in VMware fusion on the latest Snow Leopard version. I upgraded the SL to the latest version and also upgraded VMWare Fusion to V3. I am still getting a slow response from my XP VM. Really strange as this was running perfectly fine before the SL upgrade. Bit confused, and about to start a defrag (however long that may take) on the XP VM. If anyone has an ideas, I would greatly appreciate a response.

Edit

_{Taken from OP's answer to this question}

Ok I ran defrag, and updated the spotlight settings toignore the VM folders, and seems to be a little quicker however apart from freeing up a serious amount of space(yay!) its not as quick as before the Snow Leopard upgrade.

I running the VM with 1 Processor and 1024 Mb Memory.

Is it worth backing up my data and rebuilding my OSX nd then reinstall fusion 3? If i reinstalling, should install Leopard firstand then run the upgrade, or can i just run the SL disk alone.

Answer 1

How much physical memory does your machine have? If you only have 2 GB, and you've allocated 1 GB to the XP VM, it's possible that you are doing a lot of swapping. Try running Activity Monitor and checking to see if the "Page ins" and "Page outs" numbers on the "System Memory" tab are increasing while you are running your VM.

Answer 2

Some times it can be "Spotlight" indexing, You could try disabling spotlight indexing that folder through:
System Preferences => Spotlight => Privacy
and adding your VM folder to the list.

Answer 3

Have you re-installed the VMWare Fusion tools in the XP box?

How many processors is VMWare set to use for the virtual machine? (Virtual Machine Settings -> Processor)

Is Accelerate 3D Graphics turned on?

The reason for the slow operations, is that you only have 1 Gb of ram. If you are going to run Parallels or VMWare you need to have at least 2 Gb or 3 Gb of Ram.

If you are running stock settings right now, you have roughly 512 Mb (50% of your memory) dedicated to VMWare, and the rest of your memory split between the Mac OS, and any other applications you running....

Your running out of memory, and using Virtual memory... Which is a slow substitute for real memory...

Answer 4

Hi kam, I'm having the same issue. Did you ever find a solution?

I have a near-new MBP with 4GB RAM. I've got an XP VM and a Windows 7 32-bit VM installed (not trying to run them both at once of course, just testing both). The XP machine used to run very fast on 10.5, but after I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and VMWare fusion 3 (plus latest upgrades of all software), it's running very slow. I've tried allocating different amounts of RAM, 1 or 2 CPU's, etc... nothing really seems to work, the VM's are just a lot slower than they were on the previous version...

Looking in my activity monitor, VMware runs between 5% and 75% CPU, and the disk I/O spikes quite a bit (even though there is plenty of RAM available - right now I have 1.5GB RAM wired for VMware and it's only running XP which should theoretically require a bit less ram than Win7 I think, and it's still very sluggish)...

Answer 5

Hi Josh, Sorry , pretty slack of me not posting my solution! I can 100% confirm that a fresh install of Snow Leopard (no Leopard install required) Will fix this issue. The problem is the upgrade of Leopard to SL is not good at all. Use carbon cloner to backup the existing OS just incase something goes wrong you have a back up to restore from. Then do a full backup of any files you want to copy across to your clean SL install. It took me a couple of days to get this done because the backup of my 160GBHDD took time over USB, If you have a firewire drive this will be considerably quicker. Then do the install of SL from the installation disk. When you first boot into the SL installer, you will be able to access the Disk Utility form the Utilities tab, format teh HDD and once complete move on to the next install step where you will be asked to choose a drive to install onto. Im sure you know the rest ;)

Good Luck and let me know how you get on

Cheers Kam