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After exiting VMWare player, my main OS (Windows 7) lags and slows down tremendously. The HDD is seeking excessively. I see that the issue is that it's swapping tons of pages rapidly. This lasts for about 5-10 minutes.

I followed the instructions here http://twigstechtips.blogspot.ca/2009/03/fix-vmware-slow-to-release-swapped.html but they don't work. It was 3 years ago so I think the fix is outdated.

Or rather I don't know where this guest.vmx file is. The closest thing I could find to a config file is C:\Users\Jack\AppData\Roaming\VMware\preferences.ini

Anyone have a new solution?

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  • Most likely, it's still processing a snapshot. You can turn this off or not use snapshots as much, but I would make sure this is what you want to do. May 13, 2012 at 23:44
  • How much physical ram do you have and how much are you allocating to the VM?
    – Paul
    May 13, 2012 at 23:44
  • @Paul It's not a RAM problem. I have 8GB and giving 2GB to the VM. I can use both of them simultaneously with no performance problems. It is only when I exit the VMWare player that the slow down begins.
    – Jack
    May 14, 2012 at 1:05
  • Report of a similar problem: superuser.com/questions/399446/…
    – ncoghlan
    May 20, 2012 at 14:33
  • @ncoghlan You realize that there was no solution in that question, right?
    – Jack
    May 21, 2012 at 19:05

1 Answer 1

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vmx is refering to the .vmx file of you machine. So if your machine's name is webDev2012 then the file you should search is webDev2012.vmx

Open this file and add these three lines:

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"

enojoy...

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  • 1
    The original source of these instructions appears to be Bryon Brewer's blog article "VMWare Guest Shutdowns very slow". Per that article, the file to edit is actually \ProgramData\VMware\VMware Player\config.ini (replace "VMware Player" with "VMware Workstation" if that's what you're using).
    – bishop
    Aug 29, 2014 at 13:45
  • My file is at C:\Users\UserName\Documents\VirtualMachines\Ubuntu64\Ubuntu64.vmx
    – Alaa M.
    Nov 27, 2017 at 8:46

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