Please forgive the stupid question.
If I run too many guest operating systems at the same time under VMware Fusion, it bogs down everything, including the host Mac. It can get to the point where it takes 30 seconds or much longer to load a web page in Safari, launch a simple application (such as Contacts or Calendar, for example), open a file from within a running application, etc. It happens when I run too many guest OSs, where I may be running updates on Patch Tuesday, booting or shutting them down, etc. - nothing too intensive.
Here is my Question:
Which resource is the bottleneck that slows everything down?
I have looked at many different measurements - CPU, Disk I/O, Network I/O, etc. All measurements seem quite low. There is plenty of RAM and disk space still available. I am using a variety of tools to view resources in use, but so far, none of them shows anything "pegging the needle". Nothing stands out as the major cause for the slowdown. In theory, everything should run fast considering the low resource levels being reported, but that isn't the case. Clearly a resource is being serialized, blocked, restricted, or consumed, but I am stumped.
Can anyone tell me the root cause of the slowdowns? Does anyone have suggestions on how to figure it out?
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Yes, of course I understand that running lots of VMs simultaneously will bog down the system, but that's not the point. The point is identifying which resource is the root cause of the slowdowns. Thanks for reading.