This is so bizzare that I cannot believe my eyes!!!

I am currently evaluating Paralles Desktop for Mac on my Mac Pro 2x2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon. Everything seems to work fine, except for Bridget Ethernet networking. The data transfer is so slow that it is totally useless. I tried the same WinXP, Ubuntu and RH Linux; no difference at all.

For example, from a http-server of mine that is located on the same LAN, I measured the data transfer to be about 120 bytes per second. This is terribly slow. It is even worse with sites like www.bbc.co.uk, www.cnn.com etc. The data transfer against them is so slow that I am unable to measure it. CNN, for example, actively drops connection after a second or two, I guess due to the clients inactivity. I never got a single byte from BBC, by the way, so I have nothing to measure against. This is very, very odd.

However, ICMP-utilities (e.g. those that do not do data transfer, like ping or traceroute) get normal response times from all the sites I tried to communicate with.

After many tries, I accidentally entered the address www.google.com in my browser. Voila, the data came almost instantly. "Wow!" - I thought, "it must be that networking got better somehow". So I tried all over again all the sites I had had so much trouble with. Alas, no improvement at all. It was just Google that worked fine. I know it is bizzare...

So I started probing different sites. I found out that approx. 10% of sitets work quite fine with Parallels. For example, Google, GMail, www.tv2.no, www.gyldendal.no, www.abc.net.au are some of the sites that have normal data transfer with my virtual machine. Mu conclusion is that Parallels somehow has the capability of working properly. It is just that it does not use it every time.

The host machine (Mac OSX) does not have any problems with data transfer with anyone whatsoever, so I gues I can rule out routing problems.

Does anyone have any idea about what is going on?

 

the obvious question to satrt with.. did you make sure you installed Parallels Tools ?

If so, I would look at the connections properties under XP and make sure its set to full duplex at the correct speed.

 

There are two ways to deal with this problem. One involves toggling the MTU setting in OS X's System Preferences—>Network and the other, which is what I use, is to connect the VM using the "Host only with internet sharing" method. Going into detail about this is something I don't have the time for right now, but searching in the Parallels Desktop for Mac fora will give you the answer(s) you're looking for. Good luck!

 

Is "Parallels Tools" available for Linux?

 

Thanks, jbmalby. Toggling MTU didn´t help. However, "Host Only" with Internet Sharing did.

It is nuisance to set IP-address manually every time i boot a guest OS, but this is just a minor issue. Thanks again.

 

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Not yet.
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What Linux distro are you running. The symptom that you are describing is normally fixed by disabling IPV6 in Linux. In SuSE 10.1 (for example), this is fixed by the following;

Open up konsole, su to root and run:

echo "alias net-pf-10 off" >> /etc/modprobe.conf
echo "alias ipv6 off" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

Reboot