PD4 optimal configuration?

I'm as frustrated as the rest of the PD4 customers that upgraded from PD3. PD3 performed very well, PD4 well does not.

The overall sluggishness and virtual XP freezes...are really unacceptable.

What I'm looking for is the OPTIMUM settings from Parallels to configure for my environment:

Macbook Pro 2.4 Core 2 Duo 4 Gb RAM
OS X 10.5.6

Windows XP SP2 non boot camp

I've tried a number of configurations and for some reason when I dumb down the VM to a single processor, 1024 RAM, and hypervisor disabled, it works better than giving it more resources and using the "better" hypervisor management layer.

very frustrated. and yes I have the latest build.

 

I too am having the same type of problems, so I hope we can get some difinitive answers here. My VM was running well on PD3, now way slower on PD4 since I upgraded. I run it on a Mac Pro with 8G of Ram, and it runs like a snail and also freezes.

 

Out of curiosity, what kind of freezes are you seeing? I have been having periodic whole-computer freezes (when running civIV in Parallels with 2Gb memory assigned to XP SP3). Mouse doesn't move, and keyboard is unresponsive. A few times I have gotten the "you need to turn off your computer using the power button" messages, and since 10.5.6, these are saved with reports for Apple, and they say that the culprit is

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: prl_vm_app

The timing is completely random, and the freezes may be unrelated to the forced reboots caused by prl_vm_app, so I don't really have useful info for diagnostic purposes.

When a PC would normally "blue-screen", what happens with parallels on a mac?

 

sporadically the screen just begins to crawl, or is non-responsive at all coming out of sleep mode so I'm forced to restart the VM.

even when it's not crawling or hung...the performance just isn't as good as PD3.

 

I see. I recently ordered a computer with PD4 pre-installed, so as far as I am aware, no upgrade from 3->4 was done on my computer, which eliminates possible problems due to upgrading. prl_vm_app is generally reported to take about 50% CPU, even when XP is idling, which is a lot less than some folks have been reporting. I have a macbook pro with 4gb memory. My guess is that there are so many configurations out there that it would be hard to give a "standard" optimal configuration, but it would be nice if there were some recomendations with Windows version, and memory configuration.

 

Please upgrade to build 3810 from http://parallels.com and check situation

 

John, if that was addressed to me, I installed 3810 the day after it came out. Btw, after 3810, XP did seem a bit faster.

My impression (no hard facts though) is that freezes seem to be more common when the shared directory that Civ IV saves files to, fills up. I believe it saves files to <shared mac documents folder>/My Games/... And when there are a hundred or so save files, the mac is more likely to freeze. But this is completely random, so this may not have to do with anything.

 

look at the last line of my first post...LATEST BUILD IS INSTALLED

 

Please check following kb article
http://kb.parallels.com/en/5963

 

I guess, it is better to create ticket in support, as I cannot understand situation without additional information
http://www.parallels.com/support/desktop/request/
Do not forget to include report ID in ticket subject

wrgeck - provided information and I understand what is going on,
from your post I can not get information to suggest solution

 

although I can certainly submit an incident report, my experience with your support team has not been very good in the follow up category...since I do this for a profession (provide worldwide tech support for a software product we build)...I can say my experience with this team has been very dissapointing in the past.

anyway, what I'm looking for is not support, I'm looking for best practices configuration information for the environment I posted in the first posting, that's all.

how does Parallels recommend that I configure PD4 for this environment...you have all the pertinent environment information.

furthermore, there is basically nothing running outside of the OS other than Trend Micro Office Scan...and the applications I run in the VM are MS Office and Quicken, that's it.

thanks for any assistance you can provide.

 

How do you measure performance, what is actually running slow, Shared Folders, Applications, Network?

 

Sorry John. With a random freeze -- it is very difficult to figure out what the problem is. I can just report general trends for when it occurs. Basically, it only occurs when I am running Civ IV, and will usually happen randomly (like scrolling in the window, or doing random things). But, it appears to only occur when I have a large number of save files in:

\\.psf\Home\Documents\My Games\Fall from Heaven 2\Saves\single

I also have McAfee installed, rather than the produce that comes with Parallels (is that an issue?)

The freeze does not occur while a save is in progress. And after a freeze, the last save does not appear corrupted (for instance, if a file flush was occuring). So the fact that the shared directory has 200 items in it -- I don't see how that could cause a problem. I had a second shared folder opened to the same directory above, that I have since removed, and I clear out this directory now periodically. We'll see if that prevents future freezes. If it doesn't, then the shared folder is not an issue.

I have reported the issue on the apple forums as well, where some have the opinion freezes are an apple problem.

 

the screen begins to "paint" as if there is a huge memory leak.

 

Please check this article
http://kb.parallels.com/en/5963

 

Greetings. I just thought I'd put my 2 cents in.

In general PD4 CAN be faster if you are running in Windows Mode or Full Screen mode. In these modes, for me, PD4 gives excellent performance. However, if you are running it in Coherence mode, which is quite frankly the only way to remain sane running Windows, Coherence mode seems to take a drastic hit for me. I have been doing some experimentation, and this is what I have noticed. So far, applications like Microsoft Visio get INCREDIBLY jumpy. It appears as though Coherence isn't updating the screen as fast as Visio is moving objects if that makes any sense. As another example of this, go into Microsoft Word 2007, and insert an image with NO text on the screen at all in coherence. Set the text wrapping to TIGHT, and drag the image around. On my machine, this causes the same kind of jumpiness. For anything text based, so far as I can tell, Coherence runs fine, but if I have to run any kind of files from work that need Visio, I am out of luck.

I decided to boot up Parallels, and tweak with some settings to see if I can get it running any better. Right now, I have optimized everything for Virtual Machine, Adaptive Hypervisor is on, I have disabled 3D acceleration, and have given Parallels 1GB of memory. I have also disabled shadows in coherence. Everything is being patched right now, but my personal thought is that Parallels Desktop 4 there is either something with the way Parallels Desktop posts screen updates to Coherence is set to refresh the Mac side at a slower pace then in previous versions, or possibly that with 3D acceleration enabled, the additional load on the system maybe causing an issue. I will report back what I find, but so far, even though PD4 has some great features, I don't know if I can personally justify the features for the performance hit in practical business work on this.

 

In lieu of specs from Parallels on the optimal configuration for my environment, I have continued to make modifications, below is my current config that is more stable and a bit faster (again, dumbing down the new config features)

Mac environment

Macbook Pro 2.4 Core 2 Duo 4 Gb RAM
OS X 10.5.6
Windows XP SP2 non boot camp
Apple Cinema HD Display 30

Parallels Desktop 4
Fulll Screen mode using Spaces

In the Configure Area
Optimization:
Adapative Hypervisor: DISABLED
Optimize performance for: VIRTUAL MACHINE
Optimize power consumption for: BETTER PERFORMANCE

CPU:
Number of CPUs: 1

Memory:
1024 MB

Video memory:
256 MB

Hard Disk 1:
Image File: Expanding disk 74.5 GB

Under Parallels Desktop Preferences...

Memory: Automatically

 

Also try testing it out to see if disabling 3D makes it any faster unless 3D is necessary.

 

Definitely slower PD4 here.

Just for fun, try running Dragon Natural Speaking on PD4. In PD4, one dictates, and then waits seconds for a response. In PD3, it appeared instantaneously. Same optimized settings as previous post except 3GB to VM.

 

slowness increases over time

I should've mentioned that the system starts out quite snappy and delightful. However, the snappiness goes inversely with time, and within 10 minutes, it has become essentially catatonic.

Of course, any relevant and useful suggestions are always welcome.

David