Bug with 2 VMs on dual-core iMac

I've had very good success with using Parallels and either an OpenBSD 3.8 or Windows 2K VM.
However, if I run both VM together, then hell breaks loose. What I mean is that sooner or
later, one of the two VM enter a busy loop, (top shows 100% CPU used by one Parallels task)
and the system either stops or becomes very sluggish.

It is impossible to recover from this situation, kill or kill -9 (force quit) fail. Only a hard reset
on the iMac "fix" the issue. Has anyone else seen that behaviour? I've already reported that
on beta6, and I really hoped that RC would fix it

 

I had this before when both tried to use sound or USB or a physical device like CD. I have an OpenSuSE 10.1 and an XP/SP2 running in parallel (neither of which has either of the devices mentioned enabled) and this is running quite well.

/D

 

Thanks for reporting - we will check this.

 

I've no sound, no usb and no CD on the OpenBSD vm, but it crashes the same way.
The following TOP output was taken when the system was totally idle.

I did the following:

1) Start windows 2K VM (I guess it's processes 194/195). I've used it 1hour without
any issue.
2) Start OpenBSD VM. No problem here so far.
3) Start a compilatopm on OpenBSD VM, and at the same time start NetBeans on
the Win2K VM. Both operation are disk-intensive, and Netbeans is very RAM
hungry.
4) Netbeans has not completely started after 5 minutes. The windows is up, but
"Scanning Project Classpaths" is hung at 34%.

At this point, both VM still work, OSX is fine (I guess running on the other core), but
the Win2K VM feel like you're on an i386. Moving a windows is slow and so on.

Code:

Processes:  49 total, 3 running, 46 sleeping... 174 threads            07:33:27
Load Avg:  1.68, 1.81, 1.20     CPU usage:  2.3% user, 59.3% sys, 38.3% idle
SharedLibs: num =  143, resident = 25.2M code, 3.10M data, 4.02M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num =  6314, resident =  120M + 10.8M private, 1014M shared
PhysMem:   862M wired,  445M active,  700M inactive, 1.96G used, 37.2M free
VM: 7.33G + 88.1M   179471(0) pageins, 1061(0) pageouts

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
  224 top          5.7%  0:51.84   1    18    20   720K   736K  1.17M  26.9M
  223 bash         0.0%  0:00.00   1    14    16   208K  1000K   796K  27.1M
  222 login        0.0%  0:00.01   1    16    40   164K   736K   644K  26.9M
  220 Terminal     0.3%  0:03.25   4    91   136  2.25M  8.38M  9.02M   232M 
  218 Parallels    0.0%  0:00.00   1     8    77  1.89M  9.95M   604K  96.7M
  217 Parallels    3.7%  5:29.91  10   115   364  19.8M   354M  73.6M   767M
  215 ZTerm        0.2%  0:11.61   2    78   139  14.3M  6.99M  20.1M   340M
  209 Safari       0.3%  0:12.53   6   124   225  11.5M  13.7M  22.8M   246M
  205 cupsd        0.0%  0:00.02   2    29    25   436K  1.09M  1.57M  27.8M
  204 translated   0.0%  0:00.02   1    11    20   172K  1.05M   232K  28.2M
  195 Parallels    0.0%  0:00.00   1     8    72  1.81M  11.1M   612K  96.7M
  194 Parallels  105.1% 20:41.32  17   191   448  27.1M   622M   320M  1.03G
  192 mdimport     0.0%  0:00.11   3    61    43   776K  1.88M  2.41M  38.6M
  189 prl_dhcpd    0.0%  0:00.24   1    13    29  2.38M  1.45M  2.94M  32.8M
  181 mds          0.0%  0:00.96   8    90    63  2.18M  1.69M  3.34M  42.9M
  159 crashrepor   0.0%  0:00.00   1    16    18   112K   712K   204K  26.6M
  130 automount    0.0%  0:00.01   3    40    32   304K  1.02M  1.07M  28.7M
  126 automount    0.0%  0:00.01   3    42    36   312K  1.07M  1.11M  29.0M
  123 rpc.lockd    0.0%  0:00.00   1    10    18   116K   768K   192K  26.7M
  114 nfsiod       0.0%  0:00.00   5    30    25   108K   696K   184K  28.6M
  100 ntpd         0.0%  0:00.27   1    10    19   184K   788K   372K  27.1M
   86 lookupd      0.0%  0:00.09   2    34    40   484K  1.07M  1.25M  28.5M
   84 iTunesHelp   0.0%  0:00.03   1    52    71   504K  2.73M  1.79M   209M
   81 Finder       0.0%  0:00.60   3   107   135  4.18M  7.42M  8.51M   240M
   79 SystemUISe   0.0%  0:04.65   2   218   202  4.18M  6.10M  9.43M   242M
   78 Dock         0.0%  0:02.31   2    88   117  1.18M  16.5M  10.5M   207M

 

Hmm, this time, after waiting 5 more minutes, the system recovered by itself. let's see.

 

This bug is not fixed on RC2. while I've not been able to reproduce the crash,
having 2 VMs running is imposssible for me.