Help. I am getting crushed by performance issues on my VMware Fusion 4.14 on OSX 10.7.5, running Windows 7. Weekly, starting late thursdays/early fridays, the VM slows to a crushing crawl. That crawl persists until late saturday or sunday. I'm guessing, but not clear on how, that something continues to autoupdate and grinds the system to a halt during this download and install process. Obviously, I've turned off autoupdate on both VMware and Windows update.
The native VMware Fusion system is what seems to be crawling, I get through the initial VMware splash screen but then on the the Windows startup, the system crawls, right from the "starting windows" splash. The "Fireflies" take an eternity to get to the Windows logo... sometimes upwards of 15 minutes to get through to the login box. Then an additional 15 minutes to get Windows fully loaded to the desktop with all background processes loaded.
The VM is approximately 18 months, old, it's been moved and duplicated both as backup and for performance tweaking. The VM is being used to run a scientific piece of equipment (USB connected) that my wife is using for her PhD. She completed a pilot study using this setup without ever having performance problems about 9 months ago, then we put the VM aside as she spent about 9 months crunching the data rather than collecting. All collection is done in this VM; all the data processing was done native in Excel on the Mac as that's our primary OS. Now she's trying to collect for her final project, and every time she has subjects lined up to do data capture on a weekend, the VM crawls to this unusably slow state. If she lines up a subject to capture on a weeknight, she hasn't had problems, but friday, saturday and sunday capture is fruitless. This issue has been ongoing for about 5 weeks. The scientific equipment she's using is a sensor mat for studying human walking; it collects data at 1000hz to a text file; measurements such as speed, direction, mass, and derivative calculations based on x/y foot positions on the mat. If the guest OS is slow, the system won't work at all or you lose huge chunks of data in this real-time data acquisition, as the device has no onboard capture or data queueing. It all goes over USB to the software in the guest OS.
To try and solve the problems, I've uninstalled and reinstalled VMware tools (a couple of times); cleared all caches, cleaned up disk image, tried moving the VM to the 2nd HDD to ensure the system wasn't bottlenecking with too many writes to the same drive as the host OS, moved it back again to get the SDD benefit (which was huge), upgraded OSX to Lion, installed all Windows updates possible, disabled Spotlight indexing of the VMware folder containing the vmware images). Turned off autupdate in Windows and lndexing. Turned off Aero/Glass, turned off Unity. VM has 1 core dedicated and 4gb RAM. When the system is slow, that core is pinned at 100% on activity monitor. VMware tools has "keep clocks synched" selected. I take snapshots when everything seems to be fixed. And I've tweaked and upgraded the hardware to eliminate any bottlenecks or issues there.
System - Macbook Pro, late 2008.
Stock 4gb RAM recently upgraded to 8gb as a matched pair of Samsung RAM (with the appropriate EFI upgrade to allow 8gb allocation) in an effort to fix the speed issue.
Main system currently running off a 500gb Samsung SSD, TRIM enabled, recently upgraded about 2 weeks ago after the issues started in an effort to fix the speed.
OWC Data Doubler holding 750gb HDD upgraded during her pilot study about 9 months ago. Collected fine with this device in for a couple of months. I'm going to remove this as I saw some threads indicating issues with this device. But these reports also indicated that re-installing VMtools and ensuring DVD isn't enabled (as it isn't physically present) should fix it.
Running full manual Time Machine backups once a week via wired gigabit ethernet to a Synology NAS; otherwise day to day networking done over 802.11n wireless. Not doing VMware autoprotect. During her pilot we were backing up to a Buffalo cloudstation via Pogoplug; I also upgraded this in an effort to speed everything up (cloudstation runs at USB2 speeds, pogoplug is slow and requires a third party plugin; Synology has dual gigabit ethernet and is running raid 5 with twin 4TB 5900 rpm 6gb SATA drives). The drive space is important as each subject generates about 5gb of data; this is stored initially during capture in a folder shared between the Mac and Windows systems; after capture she moves the data out to the NAS to get it off the drive. We were running into space problems on the boot disk and VM image with the volume of data which drove the need for network storage. The NAS automounts her drive on OSX when on our local LAN via SMB; I haven't set up SMB connection from the Windows guest OS as the speed issues haven't been ironed out yet.
What more do I need to do to fix this problem? Im at my wits end. The hardware and network are now screaming, when the guest OS is working its super fast. It's been a stable windows build. All software is legal and registered. Win7 was fresh installed from a retail disk and PC-DeCrapifier was ran immediately. AVG was installed but I removed that too and have been running the guest OS network disabled to try and ensure Windows updates or AVG updates weren't the culprits. I am reluctant to upgrade OSX to Maverics and Fusion to version 6 as this Mac is 5 years old; I think that there is a higher risk for slower performance on this older CPU, and the system was running excellent 9 months ago. And from what I'm reading, people are reporting slow VMs in 10.9/Fusion6 as well.
I'm contemplating 4 things:
- Leaving the system powered up and on Ethernet, with VMware running the guest OS, to try and quickly consume any upgrades that seem to be still somehow being pushed out (despite turning off everywhere I can possibly find to do that). This can take months of lost data collection time and lost subjects to fully troubleshoot, as the problem is isolated to weekend times.
- Using LilSnitch to IP block VMware servers if I can figure out where autoupdates are coming from so that they don't hit on weekends when she's got data collection
- Rebuild the guest OS in a new VM from scratch
- Getting a low spec PC and moving the VM to a physical OS and ditching the virtualization completely. If I have to I will, but I would like to not have to do this. My wife got this equipment from the manufacturer in part to help test their next major software release. They want to know how the software works under virtualization, as their system is incompatible with Windows 7 Enterprise which is what many hospitals and academic research centers use. Until recently, we were giving them great feedback on virtualization as an option for their customers on Windows 7 Enterprise.
Help? Advice?