Hardware: Apple Macbook Air 5,2, CPU 2ghz i7, 8Gb 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM, 512Gb SDRAM HD
Software: OS X 10.9.3 Mavericks, VMWare Fusion 6.0.3, Windows 8.1 VM
VMWare machine configuraiton: 2 CPU Cores, 4096 RAM, 60Gb HD split in to multi files, Windows 8.1 utilising shared folders to access dropbox folder on OS X
Usage: VM is being used to host MS applications (predominately) for work use including Outlook, Lync, Word, Project, Excel, Visio, etc., No development work or what I would call heavy duty usage although often 4-5 apps open concurrently
I'm getting mixed performance from this machine - I noticing definite slowdowns with what should be a 1 or sub second response to a mouse click taking several seconds - this isn't all the time but certainly seems to degrade over time.
I've check OS X performance and it ticks among like nothings happening - in fact I can almost leave the VM doing something and OS X is snappy as anything.
On the VM performance monitor doesn't seem to be showing me much, I do see a reasonable amount of CPU hitting 100% but I'm certainly not doing anything that should be taxing the system
As my Win7 machine was exhibiting these symptoms I moved to 8.1 but the fix seems to be temporary or not achieved at all and 8.1 is presenting similar slow downs.
How do I troubleshoot this effectively to get to the bottom of it? I looked for best practice settings for an 8.1 VM but couldn't find anything useful.
I've heard about removing shared folders functionality but that would seriously hamper how I work and for the tasks I'm asking of the VM it shouldn't need that level of restriction to work properly anyway as it isn't like I'm running a Dev suite.
Thoughts or advice from the gurus??
Thanks