Hi everyone, I am looking at the 2.0ghz with 16gb ram mid spec mbp13 2020. I want to use to run Visual studio 2019 using parallel or fusion to do .net development. Wonder if the spec is sufficient to run these with acceptable performance. At least things doesn’t lag when typing?
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Mbp 13 2020 parallel visual studio
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I would say no. I currently have a top of the line 16” (see my signature) and it is the first machine that has acceptable performance, my 2016 top of the line 15” was not OK.
The key issue seems to be Intellisense especially if you use plugins. In my case resharper from Jetbrains. My old machine could not keep up with the per key stroke processing, resulting in that my typing could be 5-10 characters ahead of the screen, most irritating.
Visual Studio in some way seems poorly design, with two much processing on the main thread. My comclusion is that you need good turbo boost for larger projects.
I am using Fusion.
The key issue seems to be Intellisense especially if you use plugins. In my case resharper from Jetbrains. My old machine could not keep up with the per key stroke processing, resulting in that my typing could be 5-10 characters ahead of the screen, most irritating.
Visual Studio in some way seems poorly design, with two much processing on the main thread. My comclusion is that you need good turbo boost for larger projects.
I am using Fusion.
I see. Have u tried running without resharper? I wonder would it helps, as I don’t have resharper.
I used to run VS via Parallels on a 2011 MBP. Ran fine once I upgraded to a SSD and 16gb memory. With 8gb it would page too much. This was 6-7 years ago so things may have changed. I allocated 2 of the cores (i7 2.4ghz) to Parallels.
Not completely but I spent quite some time switching off various features both in resharper an VS, plus tuning the VM for performance and this was on top of the line systems.So for my use case I would never consider a 13” both from the perspective of performance and screen size.
I quit using JetBrain products because they were so heavy. We used to subscribe to IntelliJ Pro and use it for Java backends and Android apps. All their little aids made it so slow. We eventually just went with VS Code for much of our development and Android Studio for Android apps. Android Studio is like IntelliJ but without all the aids, and much more responsive.
Whenever you talk about virtualization, you have to set the stage, and your expectations. You have replies to your post showing both positive experience and negative experience. If you expect to run a VM (doesn't matter Fusion or Parallels) and do things in macOS at the same time, you have to be specced for that. If you plan on only running the VM (perhaps full screen) and nothing else, you can get away with lower specs. I used to run VMWare Fusion on a 2015 Retina MacBook Pro with Visual Studio (first Express versions, and then Community Edition). My system had the i7 2.5 GHz "Haswell" CPU, 16 GBs of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD. I would run VS in the VM, and then on macOS I would run the portions of XCode needed for Xamarin to work, and had no performance issues. My CPU was a hyper-threaded quad-core and I assigned 2 cores to the VM, and 8 GBs of RAM. I eventually switched to BootCamp and ran programs in native Windows, as macOS does not seem to give you access to the full performance of the AMD GPU. As a minimum if you want to run VMs, you want 16 GBs of RAM on your system, and I wouldn't dismiss going even higher if you want to run multiple, or bigger VMs.
Bottom line, is you want to be able to have at least 8 GBs of RAM dedicated to your VM for best performance. If your Mac only has 8 GBs of RAM, you won't be able to do that without leveraging virtual memory, and performance will suffer. Plus, it seems that Parallels VMs perform better than VMWare VMs. I switched to Fusion for interoperability between VMWare Workstation and Fusion. I could run the same VM image on both macOS and Windows.
Good luck!
Rich S.
@LinkRS provides some good advice, I will just add my own data point.
I was using the same VM in both my 2016 and 2019 16” system with 8GB and 4 vCPU. My 2016 system was 4 core / 16 GB and the 2019 was 8 core / 32 GB both machines had the highest spec CPU available at the time.
My impression was that the MBP (not the VM) Was starved for resources on the 2016. If you would start a second 4 GB test VM, the MBP would completely freeze up.
So balanced performance between VM and MAC is important.
I am running VS Enterprise Edition and my solution is about 200+ C# files.
I was using the same VM in both my 2016 and 2019 16” system with 8GB and 4 vCPU. My 2016 system was 4 core / 16 GB and the 2019 was 8 core / 32 GB both machines had the highest spec CPU available at the time.
My impression was that the MBP (not the VM) Was starved for resources on the 2016. If you would start a second 4 GB test VM, the MBP would completely freeze up.
So balanced performance between VM and MAC is important.
I am running VS Enterprise Edition and my solution is about 200+ C# files.
Thanks guys your input and perspectives are very helpful and exactly what I need to get a perspective.
I think my use case would only be either using the vm or macos at a time.
I am inching towards the 16 gb mbp13 now.
I think my use case would only be either using the vm or macos at a time.
I am inching towards the 16 gb mbp13 now.
Since you would be focusing on one OS or the other, you could easily build a 4-core 8 GB RAM VM and it should work just fine. You might be able to get away with 4-core 12 GB of RAM for the VM if you want to give it a whirl. You can always scale it back if it causes any issues. I would caution going to more than 4-cores with a 4-core CPU. Either virtualization software would allow you to select more than that, due to hyperthreading, but if the host OS gets starved for resources, it could cause your VM performance to suffer. Also, FYI I used to (using Parallels) use a BootCamp partition as my VM. That allowed me to launch it from within macOS and have access to both, and if I really needed more performance for Windows, I could just re-boot into Windows and got the full capabilities of my MacBook Pro. See here: https://www.parallels.com/blogs/how-to-run-boot-camp-in-a-virtual-machine/
Just a heads up, that post also describes how to import your BootCamp partition into a VM, I am talking about using the BootCamp Partition as a VM, not importing. Importing would be useful when you want to actually get rid of the BootCamp partition.
Good luck!
Rich S.
You won't have any problems. I ran Visual Studio under Parallels/Windows on a 2013 MacBook Air, and as long as I gave it enough RAM, it ran fine. My prevoious 2016 MacBook Pro ran it like it was native. A 2020 MBP should be golden.
One tip: if you have any performance issues, dig into Parallels' settings. There are a lot of tweaks that can be done in there, some of which I found had outsized consequences -- for example, giving the VM too much video RAM actually slowed it down.
One tip: if you have any performance issues, dig into Parallels' settings. There are a lot of tweaks that can be done in there, some of which I found had outsized consequences -- for example, giving the VM too much video RAM actually slowed it down.