Check out PD tweaker

There is a great new utility out there that aids PD and some issues it has. Its called PD Tweaker
Check it out... It remedies some of the caching issues in PD

http://www.multisolar.com/software/PDTweaker/#other-improvements

It addresses some 'weaknesses' in PD that hopefully Parallels will get to address sometime soon.

 

any guidance from the parellels team on whether this is worthwhile? I haven't noticed any paging, but then I haven't used the VM very extensively yet

 

As the author said, it may inspire the Parallels team to address these issues. All due respect to the tweaker author (and kudos to him, too), but I'd rather the Parallel team consider these requests and either address or tell us why than tweak something that I *must* keep running reliably.

 

any feedback from those who have tried it?

it looks very interesting. Has anyone tried it with the release version

 

Yes, I've been using it with the releae version quite a bit. It seems to be working reliably and seems to speed things up a little. So far so good, its working as designed.

Cheers al,
Peter

 

Personally, I really dislike the concept behind APE, what the tweaker uses to do its job. Processes injecting code and data into another process' address space is inherently dangerous and could be considered a flaw in Mac OS X that such a thing is even allowed.
That said, what the tweaker is doing is solid, and is discussed and recommended quite a while ago here: http://forums.parallels.com/thread1099.html

 

Yes, and in fact I had reported creeping absurd amounts of memory consumption by Paralells all throughout the Beta, and I was met consistently with a reply that this was "perfectly normal" for MacOS X. Bullocks. Well, glad to see someone has fixed it.

 

I've installed this and it definitely seems to speed up my Mac, especially when switching between other applications and desktops.

 

I tried this out the other day and haven't noticed much, if any, difference. What are the specs of your machines? I'm running an Intel Mini with a 2ghz Core Duo, 2 gigs of ram, and a 100gb 7200rpm hard drive. Virtual machine specs are 2ghz (single core), 1 gig of ram (512mb for Parallels), and 40gb for the hard drive.

 

How can one tell that it is actually loaded ? I think I did everything right, but I would like some objective evidence PDTweaker/APe is working.

 

Really wish Tech would chime in here for Parallels official take on this. It does indeed seem to work well, but it would be nice to hear what the developers think.

 

My guess is that the dev team is aware of how they are caching/drawing video and aware of the issues. However why they chose the approach they did is a mystery. It doesn't seem like a big deal to change but there may be a lot of ramifications in doing so.
They probably have their hands full with other features and performqance tweaking is probably back burner right now. While it would be nice to hear them weigh in, they probably won't address it on the desktop.
My $.02,
Peter

 

I have found it didn't change the responsiveness much, maybe a little for the better, but it's also fair to say I don't run it very long either. I boot up, do my stuff, and then quit.

For those who leave it running for long periods of time and switch between them often it makes it usable for long periods of time, where by default it will begin to choke after a while.

I'm running it with no issues or crashes either. Seems pretty stable.

 

Wow! Speeds things up noticeably? I'm running a MBP 2.16Ghz with 2GB of RAM and Windows XP Pro is running very fast for me. I'd be curious to see how this tweaker improves the performance. But like others have mentioned, I have my reservations because what if it destroys my virtual disk?

On another note: it would be good if the Parallels folks could create a feature (like Virtual PC 7) where you could ask it not to save the changes made to the virtual disk so that in case you screwed up and the disk messed up, you can work from a pervious version. That's one of the beauties of running virtual machines.

 

I've been using this for a little while now and I have a question. I use Parallels to do Windows developement. Over the ast few days I've noticed my build time has increased significantly. The time where it has increased the most is in a batch file that copies a bunch of files over to a directory. I turned PD Tweaker off and the problems seems to have been reduced, although I don't think it's completly gone. Now I did do a couple other things that may have resulted in the fix (such as actually shutting Windows down insteading of suspending the VM) but I just wanted to find out if PD Tweaker might be causing my problems. Another thing I might need to do is defrag the drive, I will try that also when I get some time.

Thanks,
Chris

 

Well, if you can spare the disk space, after you install/configure/get things where you want them, shut down the VM completely, then make a copy of the HDD file, burn it to DVD (if it'll fit), etc...

Then if you ever need to revert, you have a known good state to return to.

 

Works Great for Me!

I was having big problems with the release version of Parallels slowly eating away all of my memory throughout the day. I leave Parallels running all day as I use it for Outlook e-mail in the background as I really dislike Entourage for Exchange accounts.

Even when I would first launch Parallels and start up the guest OS (Windows XP), I would notice that when I clicked back over to an app in Mac OS X, or would just interact with the Finder it was jerky and slow to respond. I have a black MacBook with 2GB of physical RAM.

After installing the PD Tweaker, I have to say it was a pretty impressive speed increase. When I mean performance increase, I am referencing Mac OS X, Finder and Mac app performance. I don't really notice that much of a difference in the Guest OS itself, that has always run pretty well.

Now when I hide Parallels and use Mac OS X, it is as if Parallels isn't running at all, the performance difference is that good for me.

Just my experience...

 

I noticed some very healthy speed improvements as well, however i did get several kernel panics after installing this tweak, and ended up removing it.

I had never had any kernel panics prior to the tweak and wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary when they happened. Since removing it, its returned to being trouble-free again.

B

 

no kernel panics here

No kernel panics here, and I am experiencing a healthy speed boost. MacBook Pro 1.83Ghz, 1GB RAM, 100 GB HD, latest versions of OS X and Parallels, XP SP2 as guest OS.

 

Speed boost?

Those of you who are noticing a speed boost, what is the nature of it?

Is Windows in a VM noticeably faster? Or is it just switching back and forth between Parallels and Mac Apps?

Do you notice whether PD is using less memory (real or virtual) in Activity Monitor?

Thanks!