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Parallels very slow on MacBook Pro 15 Retina

gpsouza

gpsouza

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 1, 2012
380
79
Lisbon
Hello all!

Does anyone have problem running Parallels? I have a Late 2013 Macbook Pro 15" Retina, 8gb RAM, i7 blablabla... Parallels 10 (Original) and when using it to ONLY run Word 2013 it's barely usable. I had 3 doc opened, a few PDF's on my Mac and some tabs on safari and it was painful. Extremely lag on both ends (Mac and Windows), Mission control animation was inexistent and switching windows was too painful.

I know that my Mac may not be the very best out there, but is enough to run these simple tasks.

Word on parallels is laggy, even if it's the only goddam thing open on my Mac. What should I do?
 
gpsouza said:
Hello all!

Does anyone have problem running Parallels? I have a Late 2013 Macbook Pro 15" Retina, 8gb RAM, i7 blablabla... Parallels 10 (Original) and when using it to ONLY run Word 2013 it's barely usable. I had 3 doc opened, a few PDF's on my Mac and some tabs on safari and it was painful. Extremely lag on both ends (Mac and Windows), Mission control animation was inexistent and switching windows was too painful.

I know that my Mac may not be the very best out there, but is enough to run these simple tasks.

Word on parallels is laggy, even if it's the only goddam thing open on my Mac. What should I do?
Click to expand...

hmm, what does activity monitor look like? are you swapping memory? how much memory is allocated to the vm? i'm running parallels 10/windows 7 on both a macbook air and a macbook pro. both machines have 4 gigs ram allocated to the vm's and both vm's are very smooth.
 
no problems here and my Windows Vm does a fair bit of heavy work. I've assigned a couple of cores and 2048MB of RAM to it. No need for more RAM, benches didn't show any improvements.
 
stempsons said:
hmm, what does activity monitor look like? are you swapping memory? how much memory is allocated to the vm? i'm running parallels 10/windows 7 on both a macbook air and a macbook pro. both machines have 4 gigs ram allocated to the vm's and both vm's are very smooth.
Click to expand...

Don't know if these pictures answer your question... I don't know what swapping memory is, sorry...
 

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ianj1972 said:
no problems here and my Windows Vm does a fair bit of heavy work. I've assigned a couple of cores and 2048MB of RAM to it. No need for more RAM, benches didn't show any improvements.
Click to expand...

I'll post a video ASAP to show you how it is... But it was not very laggy this time
 
How much free space do you have left on your Mac, and in your Windows VM?
 
I note from your signature that you have a 120GB SSD.

How much free space do you have after creating the VM?
 
Late 2013 MBP with essentially the same usage (Win 8.1, Word) on Parallels 9 -- zips right along. One difference: 16GB RAM.
 
gpsouza said:
40gb :)
I should have gone for the 16gb :mad:
Click to expand...
I'm running Windows 7 in Parallels 9 on my 2011 MacBook Air, which only has 4GB of RAM, and it runs fine. I don't know how much more resources Windows 8.1 uses. But looking at how you configured the VM, I think allocating 2GB for it is fine. Have you tried bumping it up to 4GB to see if that makes a difference?

So space isn't an issue. Have you checked the SSD by running Disk Utility? Go to the First Aid tab and do a Repair Disk.
 
MJedi said:
I'm running Windows 7 in Parallels 9 on my 2011 MacBook Air, which only has 4GB of RAM, and it runs fine. I don't know how much more resources Windows 8.1 uses. But looking at how you configured the VM, I think allocating 2GB for it is fine. Have you tried bumping it up to 4GB to see if that makes a difference?

So space isn't an issue. Have you checked the SSD by running Disk Utility? Go to the First Aid tab and do a Repair Disk.
Click to expand...

Before it had 4gb and it was even worse on Mac side... Disk Utility said my disk is fine.
Did you see the video I posted here? It's just me or that is really slow?
 
gpsouza said:
Before it had 4gb and it was even worse on Mac side... Disk Utility said my disk is fine.
Did you see the video I posted here? It's just me or that is really slow?
Click to expand...
From the video, it didn't seem slow to me.

Parallels has suggestions you can try:

My Virtual Machine is extremely slow and consumes about 100% of Mac CPU resources
http://kb.parallels.com/116263

How can I improve virtual machine performance on my Mac?
http://kb.parallels.com/112091

Other than that, I don't know what else to tell you. Sorry.
 
gpsouza said:
Don't know if these pictures answer your question... I don't know what swapping memory is, sorry...
Click to expand...

See CPUs : 2 (cores) in picture posted? Try increasing it, 8 is max. Max it at 8 for a start and see if that helps (you'll have to do that while Windows VM is shut down.)
 
MJedi said:
From the video, it didn't seem slow to me.

Parallels has suggestions you can try:

My Virtual Machine is extremely slow and consumes about 100% of Mac CPU resources
http://kb.parallels.com/116263

How can I improve virtual machine performance on my Mac?
http://kb.parallels.com/112091

Other than that, I don't know what else to tell you. Sorry.
Click to expand...
Really? Maybe I'm just to picky then. Thanks for your help :)

nerowolfe said:
See CPUs : 2 (cores) in picture posted? Try increasing it, 8 is max. Max it at 8 for a start and see if that helps (you'll have to do that while Windows VM is shut down.)
Click to expand...
It made my fans run at full speed :p But it helped a little, thanks
 
looking at your video at 1:04 you look to be using all your RAM and falling into SWAP which will hurt performance.
Try a clean boot and only running the VM with 1GB assigned and see if that helps.

Assigning windows less RAM doesn't seem to hurt performance at 1GB and above IME.

Ive attached my activity monitor so you can see the difference.....
 

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Last edited:
gpsouza said:
Hello all!

Does anyone have problem running Parallels? I have a Late 2013 Macbook Pro 15" Retina, 8gb RAM, i7 blablabla... Parallels 10 (Original) and when using it to ONLY run Word 2013 it's barely usable. I had 3 doc opened, a few PDF's on my Mac and some tabs on safari and it was painful. Extremely lag on both ends (Mac and Windows), Mission control animation was inexistent and switching windows was too painful.

I know that my Mac may not be the very best out there, but is enough to run these simple tasks.

Word on parallels is laggy, even if it's the only goddam thing open on my Mac. What should I do?
Click to expand...
Did you install Parallels Tools?

And for the record, since your one doesn't have a dGPU, I'm not surprised it's lagging a fair bit.

I have a 15" with 2GB GT 750M and it never lags with VMware Fusion (with virtualization tools installed, of course).
 
I think the suggestion to reboot and restart the vm without excess OS X programs running would be the best bet. I've been sampling my VM on a macbook air with the VM on an external drive, and it does't not lag at all. In fact its running smoother than the same VM on my loaded rMBP for whatever reason. Both MacBooks are running Yosemite, and Parallels 10.
 
Unfortunately, running a VM is a pretty intensive process. I'd bump it up to 3gb of ram and 6-8 cores and see if that helps. Also make sure parallels' tools are installed in windows and you don't have any extra processes running in windows that are eating up resources.
 
ianj1972 said:
looking at your video at 1:04 you look to be using all your RAM and falling into SWAP which will hurt performance.

Try a clean boot and only running the VM with 1GB assigned and see if that helps.



Assigning windows less RAM doesn't seem to hurt performance at 1GB and above IME.



Ive attached my activity monitor so you can see the difference.....
Click to expand...


I'll try that once I get home and post a picture of activity monitor

yjchua95 said:
Did you install Parallels Tools?



And for the record, since your one doesn't have a dGPU, I'm not surprised it's lagging a fair bit.



I have a 15" with 2GB GT 750M and it never lags with VMware Fusion (with virtualization tools installed, of course).
Click to expand...


I do have parallels tools installed. I didn't think dgpu would be a problem because I'm not running any heavy duty graphic application on windows

stempsons said:
I think the suggestion to reboot and restart the vm without excess OS X programs running would be the best bet. I've been sampling my VM on a macbook air with the VM on an external drive, and it does't not lag at all. In fact its running smoother than the same VM on my loaded rMBP for whatever reason. Both MacBooks are running Yosemite, and Parallels 10.
Click to expand...


I did it already, but is kinda worthless running only windows. Preview is much better than windows pdf reader, but even preview is lagging without parallels running.

Freyqq said:
Unfortunately, running a VM is a pretty intensive process. I'd bump it up to 3gb of ram and 6-8 cores and see if that helps. Also make sure parallels' tools are installed in windows and you don't have any extra processes running in windows that are eating up resources.
Click to expand...


But maybe if I do that it will have a negative impact on Mac side.


Thank you all for your help
 
Freyqq said:
Unfortunately, running a VM is a pretty intensive process. I'd bump it up to 3gb of ram and 6-8 cores and see if that helps. Also make sure parallels' tools are installed in windows and you don't have any extra processes running in windows that are eating up resources.
Click to expand...

Adding more RAM to the VM won't help as he's already running into host memory issues indicated by the compression being applied. The poor perf is indicative of thrashing of host resources IMHO and not performance starvation within the VM.

Advice to the OP is try both ways and let us know what fixes it! Good luck!
 
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