VMWare performance problems

RandyW · n00b Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 5

I'm running VMWare 5.5.1 on my Gentoo host (2.6.15-r1) with a Windows XP SP2 guest. Performance is generally normal except for the following.

Network: Simply pinging a host is painfully slow. Ping will send 1 packet every 20-30 seconds.
Shared Folders: Accessing shared folders on my host is incredibly slow - taking again 20-30 seconds to display contents.
Shutdown/Reboot: Takes up to 10-15 minutes to get the guest OS shutdown.
Clock: VMWare tools is configured to sync the guest clock with the host - but it still drifts sometimes by several minutes (currently a 6 minute difference). I could live with this if I had to if I could get the rest of these problems resolved.

I've been researching this for months, both on this forum and through VMWare's knowledge base. I've tried several suggestions but I've not yet found a solution.

Anyone have any ideas?

itsmegawtf · Apprentice Joined: 01 Oct 2005 Posts: 150

what about your comp configuration?

RandyW · n00b Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 5

Dell D810 - 1G RAM, I've tried running the XP guest with 256M RAM and 512M RAM with no difference.

revertex · l33t Joined: 23 Apr 2003 Posts: 806

what is your host filesystem?
i'm suffering similar problems, it seems that reiserfs fragmentation is the culprit here.
I've got the same VM that was work before with no problems, now it's almost unusable.

RandyW · n00b Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 5

I'm running ext3. i should also mention that my guest is running off of a raw partition, however I did test with a standard virtual machine (not off of raw disk) which displayed the same behavior.

I started using VMWare with version 4 and did not experience this until I upgraded to 5.

jschellhaass · Guru Joined: 20 Jan 2004 Posts: 341

Was vmware installed using emerge vmware-workstation or just by grabbing it from vmware's web site?

jeff

brot · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 322

What concerns me is that if you updated the drivers in the virtual machine ?
Maybe there are problems due to old drivers for these devices...
Just select "install vmware drivers" from the menu again.. Should be worth a try.

RandyW · n00b Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 5

Thanks for the responses.

Admiral_Trigger_Happy · Guru Joined: 05 Sep 2004 Posts: 337 Location: Australia

I also noticed some perfomance hits with the new version of VMware.

I turned off experimental 3d support and that speed things up a lot, but its still not as good as the earlier versions.
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GoingDown · Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2006 4:16 am Post subject:

I also got that performance problem with new vmware - and I think I found out a solution (at least it works for me):

run vmware-config and configure your system to use only bridged networks usin your normal lan adapter, no wlan. If you configure any bridged networks to use wlan, then things will be broken. For me, it was not enought to disable network cards from Virtual Machine configuration, but it required disabling bridged network for wlan adapter as well.

If you need network support thru wlan, you must use natted network. I know that Vmware suååprts bridged networks with wlan with new version but it seems not to be the case.

RandyW · n00b Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 5

Thanks for the posts.

Admiral_Trigger_Happy · Guru Joined: 05 Sep 2004 Posts: 337 Location: Australia

I don't even have a Wireless card, and its still slow
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roguetoad · Posted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 12:19 am Post subject:

So where do I turn off experimental 3-D?
Just need my virtual windows xp to run at somewhat normal speeds.

Admiral_Trigger_Happy · Guru Joined: 05 Sep 2004 Posts: 337 Location: Australia

Well did you ever turn it on?
I think the 3d support is disabled by default, the setting is in the vmx file I think
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roguetoad · Posted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 1:15 pm Post subject:

No, I didn't turn it on in the config file. So it can't be the reason for vmware's sluggishness for me. The quest continues...

marcus0263 · Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:23 pm Post subject:

rickvernam · Guru Joined: 09 Jul 2004 Posts: 313

I was having a vmware performance problem a while back.
It cleared up when I built Drivers->Network->Dummy as a module (and of course had it loaded before starting vmware).

damienmoody · n00b Joined: 01 Sep 2006 Posts: 73

I have a Gentoo guest on a WinXP host. It's not slow enough to make me give up, but scrolling inside a program is annoyingly slow and jumpy. I have VMWare-tools installed, hdparm running, and tried loading the dummy module. So far nothing has improved GUI performance on the guest.

Incidentally, my return key is occasionally echoed in terminals, and the VMWare on occasion jumps out of full-screen mode for no apparent reason. Alt-tab also sometimes jumps two programs ahead instead of to the next program.

VMWare people - feel free to jump in and provide some solutions here...