Upgraded from 2013 MBP to 2015 5k iMac, Parallels running slow now.

DerekM1

Bit poster
Hello

I am a Civil Engineering student and have been using my 2013 retina MacBook Pro, with the 2.6 Ghz dual core processor, 512 SSD, 16 gigs of RAM, and no dedicated graphics card, all last semester with an external monitor for AutoCAD 2017 and things were running great.

I found a deal on a 2015 5k iMac, 3.2 quad core processor, 1 TB Fusion Drive, and 8 Gigs of RAM which I upgraded to 24 gbs of RAM after purchasing, and a 2 gb graphics card now thing are running horrible.

The reason I justified this purchase was because I use ArcGIS software and felt I could benefit from a quad core processor and dedicated graphics. I was not happy to go from a 512 SSD to a Fusion Drive, but the price was too good to be true.

I transferred my Parallels license and gave my monitor to my girlfriend and now Windows 10 is running horribly. I tried moving my .pvm file to my external USB 3 Samsung T3, which seemed to help. But after installing ArcGIS it is now running horribly slow, even when I don't launch ArcMap.

Currently my hardware allocations are as follows.

2/4 processors
8/24 gbs memory
512/2gb graphics memory

Please help. I thought I was upgrading and unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case with my performance. Although I never ran ESRI's ArcGIS software on my MacBook, Windows 10 in general is not running well.

Thank you for your replies. Cheers.
 
BTW, I tried doubling my processor allocation from 2 to 4, which seemed to make it worse.

This to me is counter intuitive, because my SSD gets read / writes of 400 megabits, I copied the .pvm back to my iMac's Fusion Drive from the external SSD and that actually seemed to help. Still hasn't fixed my issue with ArcMap crashing.
 
Hi DerekM1,
The performance of non-locally stored virtual machines is also depends. We recommend you to use the following types of external mass storage devices to get a good performance.
Flash Drive on Thunderbolt
Flash Drive on USB 3.0
Flash Drive on USB 2.0
Rotational Drive on Thunderbolt
Rotational Drive on USB 3.0
Rotational Drive on USB 2.0
NOTE: If you want to run a VM from NTFS-formatted partition, you need to install NTFS driver for your Mac.
Please check out this article for more information.
 
Can you please send us technical data at the moment you're experiencing slow performance (select VM window, in application menu go to Help -> Send Technical Data) and post its id here.
 
Hi DerekM1,
The performance of non-locally stored virtual machines is also depends. We recommend you to use the following types of external mass storage devices to get a good performance.
Flash Drive on Thunderbolt
Flash Drive on USB 3.0
Flash Drive on USB 2.0
Rotational Drive on Thunderbolt
Rotational Drive on USB 3.0
Rotational Drive on USB 2.0
NOTE: If you want to run a VM from NTFS-formatted partition, you need to install NTFS driver for your Mac.
Please check out this article for more information.

I am running my virtual machine off a SSD Flash Drive over USB 3. It gets better read and write speeds than my Mac's internal Fusion Drive. In theory this should work better than my Mac's internal drive.
 
Can you please send us technical data at the moment you're experiencing slow performance (select VM window, in application menu go to Help -> Send Technical Data) and post its id here.
Thank you for your reply. I ran the report, the report ID is 162484694.
 
> Thank you for your reply. I ran the report, the report ID is 162484694.

In the report I can see that C:\Windows\System32\backgroundTaskHost.exe in Windows guest eats CPU extensively. You may try to consider solutions like here to fix it.
 
Keep us posted on the issue, @DerekM1 Thanks!
I will keep you posted thank you again for your help today. I called Parallels support and they were very helpful. The advisor removed some Windows programs and changed some settings and so far it is helping significantly. I will post here if anything else arrises.
 
I will keep you posted thank you again for your help today. I called Parallels support and they were very helpful. The advisor removed some Windows programs and changed some settings and so far it is helping significantly. I will post here if anything else arrises.
Glad to know about that. Reach out to us if you require further assistance with Parallels.
 
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