Poor Virtual Machine Performance in OSX Lion

[bobak]

Hi

I've had a search and not seen what i'm after, so thought i'd start a new thread.

 

Currently running a fully working native OSX Lion 10.7.1 on a Core2Duo 4Gb DDR2 nVidia 8800GTS 320Mb etc

Using no added kexts - only DSDT with HDEF applied and EFI String for Network Card.

 

Everything works perfectly, including App Store and Time Machine and so on and performance is pretty good. I can encode/decode video quickly, run apps and movies and so on very well, no complaints.

 

However... when I run VMWare Fusion and install Windows 7 or OpenSUSE or Fedora etc, performance is very poor. Every few seconds the machine freezes up for about 5 seconds, almost like 5 seconds fine, 5 seconds frozen. On top of this the virtual machines take literally hours to install, then about 10 minutes or more to boot and work so slowly and badly they're not worth using. There's no errors or panics, just very VERY slow. Unusably slow.

 

I've tried exactly the same on my Macbook (2008) with almost the same spec, bar the gfx and everything works as expected - quickly and smoothly.

 

My friend has the same hardware as me and suffers the same problem - thought not quite as slow.

 

Any ideas why this is? Is it poor S-ATA performance or CPU utilisation? If so - any experience of any fixes. I don't want to start chucking any old kexts at it as its a very stable system, but open to informed suggestions.

Thanks

 

Spec: Core2Duo (E6300 @2.24GHz), nVidia 8800GTS 320Mb, Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6, 4Gb DDR2 800MHz, 500Gb Seagate S-ATA, S-ATA DVD-RW

[bonfilio]

Not sure if the Fusion problem is lack of direct Lion support, but I also experienced the same thing (v3.1.3). I know this really doesn't help, but switch to Parallels. It's worth it. Parallels has a competitive side/upgrade price for existing Fusion users ($39 iirc).

[Noam AA]

try moving the VM file to another hard drive, then try to load from there, it might be something with your data drive

i had once a problem with one of my drives, while doing great on almost every app, garageband lessons strutter when played from this drive (Green WD 1 TB drive, which BTW have other unrelated problem with unix systems), while tricked the app to read the files from other drive (not partition, drive) everything was extremely fine.

maybe it's this.... (though benches to the drive are good for that type of drive)

[ITIL Prince]

I had this same problem with my GA-EP45-UD3R motherboard running Lion (every version including the latest as of Sep 10).

 

Virtual machine performance was horribly slow in Lion when using VMware Fusion AND with Parallels Desktop. I mean it was taking 10 minutes to boot, and 2 minutes to pop up the Start Menu in Windows VMs.

 

I noticed a very strange behavior: If I did Command-TAB over and over again (about once per 3-5 seconds, it was crazy!), the VM would sort of work for seconds at a time, but when I stopped it would freeze the VM at least 10x slower.

 

Just when I was ready to call it quits, I was reading through a rather massive system.log file and spotted a ton of kext related errors. One by one I deleted the kexts that were generating errors, and really cleaned up my system.log file. However, the problems still remained - very poor performance of VMs regardless of program used.

 

 

So, I decided to try some new kexts. I got the latest ones from the Lion install thread and replaced my entire /Extra folder with new kexts. Rebooted, started a VM, and it was blazing fast. Same in Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. My problems have gone away.

 

Moral of the story is to check and clean your system.log, and find the latest versions of kexts for all your hardware. It's almost certain that your problem is in those kexts.

 

Good luck!

[bobak]

Ahh ok cool.

What kexts were the problems? Which ones do you use? And finally - what system are you using and do you not use DSDT?

 

I am using a custom DSDT (AutoPatcher wit HDEF applied and graphics altered to show 320Mb) and 3 kexts: AHCIPortInjector, NullCPUPowerManagement and IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector..oh and of course lnx2mac's Realtek network kext pkg.

 

Do you use these?

 

Thanks - very much appreciated. I did a rebuild and noticed with VMWare Fusion 4 it was quicker, but still nowhere near as fast as my lesser specc'd Macbook, so something still not quite right.

 

Oh and if the guy advertising Parallels wants to give me a free copy and it works i'd be happy to endorse it.

[simt]

I know this is an old Thread, but are there any updates or advice on this problem? Both VMWare Fusion and Parallels have really poor performance running Windows or Linux on my machine.

[simt]

Well I'm adding my system specs so people will believe me that this is a real issue here

Intel Q6600 at 2.13GHz
GA-EP45-DS3
8GB DDR2 RAM
GeForce 9800GT 512MB
Lion on a Raid-0 of 2 32GB SSDs

It can't be possible that it is an issue of hardware resources when I run any Linux distribution with 1 core, 1GB of RAM and can't even maintain a stable SSH-connection from the host to the client, I'm not asking for 3D-performance or anything unusual.

 

The kext's I added are:

 

ALC885_889a.kext and AppleHDA.kext for audio

RealtexRTL81xx.kext for Ethernet

 

Furthermore I:

 

Patched my DSDT for my 9800GT and use GraphicsEnabler=Yes

I added a device-string for my ethernet to work with the App Store

 

 

I would appreciate any help on this because I really need my virtual machines to work.

Where do I start to fix this? What are relevant messages in my system.log?