3.0 and CPU utilization

N

Neuron

Member
Parallels CPU usage?

Is the CPU usage expected to be reduced before the GA release? I'm seeing Parallels consuming a minimum of 30% CPU on my 2GHz MBP while running a WIndows XP Pro guest that is idle after a fresh install. I can live with that if I have to, but that seems to be quite a lot of overhead for an idle guest.

I'm going to try to find the time to try a couple of other guest operating systems to see if I see similar results, but if some other people could post what they're seeing I'd appreciate it.
 
FWIW, I have win2k3 server idle right now on my MBP 2.16G, and I have one core fluctuating between 20-50%, and the other core pretty much idle.
 
Windows 98 consumes 128%

Windows 98 installed on my MacBook Pro 2GHz consumes 128% CPU according to Activity Monitor. And that's when the guest OS is idle! One core is around 90% and the other is around 40%.
 
Windows 98 is not good example. It is old OS and it use inifinite loop instead of HALT in idle state. But anyway it should be examined.
 
Beta2 even more CPU usage?

Seems like Beta2 uses even more CPU. I'd be happy if it was low only when you "suspend" the VM, and/or when in the background. It definitely heats up my MacBook Pro when running. Since the startup and shutdown time (whether you do a formal "shut down" inside Windows or save the state of the guest) is quite time consuming, I'd like to keep it running in Suspend mode and hidden all the time until I need to use it. Then it would be "instant on". Right now I can't do that due to high CPU usage all the time...
 
38% on idle

XP is showing 1% CPU usage, and Parallels shows 38% in the Activity Monitor.

Regardless, extrememly awesome program -- Beta 2 uses more CPU... but less Kernel Panics than Beta 1. :)

Now I can use my Windows dev environment (and Visio) without dual booting!

System:
Macbook Pro
2 GHz
2 GB RAM
Version: 10.4.6

W8607 -- One of the first... no problems yet :)
 
i can confirm this also. Because of the "feel" of Windows 2000 in PW i decided to download the trial and install it on my XP Host machine. Well lets just say that the exact same VM copied across boots about 45 seconds faster on the XP host than the Mac host. Both machines have 512 Ram and are using the same exact VM image. The Mac should kill the Windows box because it has 2 cores, VT tech, SATA drives, etc. This leads me to believe that i have nothing to worry about and because of the beta status of this product it will FLY once they turn off the debugging or whatever is holding it back. I am also curious if there is a way to do (or will be) nonpersistent drives like in VMWare.

-ivel
 
I saw this too so I profiled it in Shark. It looks like it is calling mt_set_interrupts_enabled for most of the CPU usage. It makes the VM "sticky" feeling at times and even pinwheels with low usage.
 
CPU utilization on Debian is also 30%

I noticed my battery draining quickly and found that Parallels seems to use 30% of the CPU even when the host is idle (Linux top was reporting 0% CPU utilization).
 
Chalk me up for this one too. 1st gen MBP 2GHz 2GBs RAM. Idle around 30% usage. MacBook Pro runs hot, and battery life is much less than normal.

Hope you guys get a fix for this one soon, so I don't cook my MBP and have to collect on my Apple Pro Care.

:)
 
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CPU usage

Thanks for this great version!.

What I noticed is that the increase of CPU usage only happened (in my case) when I used the new VM linked to the bootcamp partition, when I closed that VM and started the other one which was defined before (rel. 1970) the usage was about 15% at the most and the fans never started (unlike the case of the bootcamp VM).

Hope this information helps and thanks again, I specially liked the seamless integration with the apple desktop.
 
CPU Utilization with idle Windows VM

After installing release 3094 Beta 2, I am seeing a CPU utilization rate of over 60% (2.16 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro w/ 1.5 GB physical memory) while "running" an idle Windows XP VM. From inside the VM, Windows Task Manager indicates 96% idle. Even when the VM is explicitly paused, the CPU utilization is at 15%. What are the expected CPU utilization rates under these circumstances.

A side effect is that the MacBook never really sleeps and battery time is minimized.
 
Same on the latest beta 2 with Coherence. MBP 17 Dual Core, 2Gb RAM. WinXP all latest updates. Set 768Mb for Parallels, total allocated for XP is 640Mb. CPU usage when idle is around 30%
 
CPU usage 20-60% at idle

This is the only deal-breaking obstacle I have to using Parallels all the time with my MBP C2D 2.16 / 2GB. With the last few beta releases as well as 1970, i've experienced anywhere from 15-60% CPU usage from activity montior with an 1-2% idle XP SP2 VM. This absolutely kills the battery life on the MBP - reducing it to less than 2 hours.

I'm considering trying out the fusion beta to see if that helps things at all if this doesn't get resolved soon. Anyone else have any ideas or solutions to this problem? I've got the parallels tools running, i've killed or disabled all unnecessary services in XP. When I ran OSX Shark against the parallels process it looks like nearly all idle cycles are going towards the ml_set_interrupts_enabled call, as was detailed in a previous thread in April:

http://forum.parallels.com/archive/index.php/t-270.html

It seems like this is either a lingering bug or something which they have no solution to despite having promised a fix in numerous prevous posts. Believe me, I have scoured these forums! This product is so close to ideal - it would be nice if the features it had were stable and reliable before adding more bells and whistles.

Erik
 
Still in beta 3

The product is great. But this problem totally makes it useless. It would seem more logic to me, to stop coherence and all the eye candy development until this problem would be solved... really, this kind thing is important! And Vmware knows it...
 
Also seeing 30-70% utilization in the host and zero in the Virtual Machine when using RedHat and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Its less under Windows but still at 15-40%
I vaguely recall an issue on VMWare with 2.6 kernels where the default hertz setting is set at 1000 and this caused all sorts of perfromance and time sync issues...
This could be a problem under parallels too?
Dom.
 
Thanks for your detailed description of this problem,
We will investigate this issue in detailes and will try to find the source of the problem. We definitely understand the inportance of host cpu usage caused by the guest, aspecially for laptop users. We will constantly try to make our product better for everyday use.
This kind of detailed problem description does greatly help us to make better product. Thank you and happy new year!
 
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