Windows 7 VM slows MPB

[fistlo]

Early 2011 MBP 2GHz Quad-core i7 with 8GB ram. Running Windows 7 64bit.

I give 4GB to the windows 7 VM and give it 4 cores (8 total when considering hyper-threading)

Windows is fairly fast but my mac side becomes intolerable slow... even after shutting down the VM it remains slow!

I have to reboot my mac and even running the 'purge' command in terminal doesn't do much. Any thoughts?

Also I am considering moving to windows XP instead of Windows 7... I use it mostly for gaming SWTOR.

Thanks

 

[McGiord]

Check with Activity Monitor what is going on.
Also check in the Console for any clues.

 

[fistlo]

I can see the 'Wired' memory get reduced by 4GB when I close the VM and purge will get me a little more free ram. Besides that nothing is strange; no irregular CPU usage etc...

Otherwise remains extremely slow until reboot. Examples of this are seconds lag opening a new app and delayed scrolling in safari. Noticeable UI delays.

 

[shortcut3d]

You have not listed the virtualization technology. Assuming its VMware Fusion, try to upgrade to Fusion 4. They have numerous fixes for Lion.

 

[fistlo]

Similar results from both Fusion 4 and Parallels 7. Same virtual machine, built on Fusion 4 and converted over.

 

[johnhurley]

Early 2011 MBP 2GHz Quad-core i7 with 8GB ram. Running Windows 7 64bit.

I give 4GB to the windows 7 VM and give it 4 cores (8 total when considering hyper-threading)

Windows is fairly fast but my mac side becomes intolerable slow... even after shutting down the VM it remains slow!

I have to reboot my mac and even running the 'purge' command in terminal doesn't do much. Any thoughts?

Also I am considering moving to windows XP instead of Windows 7... I use it mostly for gaming SWTOR.

Thanks

I would first try by reducing how many cores you have assigned it. Keep memory allocation the same and check via activity monitor what is going on from the mac os x side.

Maybe start with 1 core and test for a while, 2 cores and test for a while ... etc.

After doing some checking and baseline benchmarking you could try similar things with the memory allocation size.

What's SWTOR?

 

[bcburrows]

I am in the same situation as use.
Same MBP
Parallels
I give it4gig but only 2 cores.
Am playing around with parallels now to see how it works.

I would be very interested to hear how you get on with Star Wars though

 

[fistlo]

I am in the same situation as use.
Same MBP
Parallels
I give it4gig but only 2 cores.
Am playing around with parallels now to see how it works.

I would be very interested to hear how you get on with Star Wars though

Star Wars worked eventually but the game itself was too buggy to play over a VM reliably with this setup.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Early 2011 MBP 2GHz Quad-core i7 with 8GB ram. Running Windows 7 64bit. I give 4GB to the windows 7 VM and give it 4 cores (8 total when considering hyper-threading)

Anything higher than

(real cores) / 2

does slow down the host OS. The host OS kernel switches between threads and CPU cores. More threads in the host OS mean more CPU time which is necessary for the thread management. You should also minimize the amount of RAM, which you give your VM. And enable the "Intel VT-x with EPT" option, if you use VMware Fusion. This improves the memory management, and reduces the CPU cycles, which are necessary for the VM-memory management, to a minimum (hardware accelerated memory management).

I have to reboot my mac and even running the 'purge' command in terminal doesn't do much. Any thoughts?

The purge command is useless in this case. The purge command does not touch the address spaces of other applications, so it cannot release 100 % private memory.

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You have not listed the virtualization technology. Assuming its VMware Fusion, try to upgrade to Fusion 4. They have numerous fixes for Lion.

Has nothing to do with 10.7.x.

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What's SWTOR?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic