Hi all,
As the title suggests, whenever I run any VM in Parallels 12 in Sierra, regardless of what I am doing in the VM, CPU usage spikes to 100%, and the whole macbook becomes extremely hot very shortly after (for obvious reasons). I'm using an early 2015 Macbook Pro 15" while trying to run parallels.
I've tried everything I can think of, including:
- Reinstalls or Parallels and OS X
- Tinkering with more Parallels settings than I can count as well as settings in the guest VM
- Modifying NVRAM settings
I've tried all of these in an attempt to alleviate the crazy CPU usage, but as soon as I go into the VM, I can see the CPU spike to 100%, regardless of what I am doing, despite all the changes I've made.
For instance, I had Ubuntu installed as a VM, and when looking through the file explorer in ubuntu and having the Mac activity monitor visible on the host, I could see the CPU spike as soon as I started moving around, and it remained at 100%+ while I did fairly menial tasks. The VM itself doesn't have a huge amount of resources assigned (2 CPU threads and 2GB RAM), so I can't see how the VM could be draining the host of resources (which I've seen mentioned).
Is this just how Parallels performs? Or is there some magic thing I can do to fix issues such as this? Right now I consider it unusable as after around 5 minutes of usage the Macbook becomes molten and the fans may as well be jet engines.
Cheers,
Alex
Last edited: Oct 17, 2016