Disk usage intermittently high and big lags with Parallels and Windows 10

Don Awalt

Don Awalt

Hunter
I thought I would post here in case others are seeing the same thing, but since I had Windows 10 version 17758.1 installed I think late last week, I have noticed it seems very slow at times - big delays like even clicking the Start icon and it takes 10 seconds for the menu to appear. Some apps will take about 5 seconds or so to actually appear and other times it is instantaneous, like the Start icon usually is. There are no apps running when this happens. So it's more of an intermittent problem that regularly appears. As another example, the latest version of Quicken for Windows - sometimes it comes up in a second, other times it can take 10 seconds before anything appears. Nothing works - no keystrokes, nothing, The lag happens about 30% - 50% of the time. And note, I have nothing really running - I just jump to this VM to run an app I need under Windows from time to time, it is mostly idle!

I am running it this build on a MacBook Pro 2018, which I have had for about a month. This idly started last week. I am using Parallels latest (14.0.1), I have seen this with as much as 8 GB memory allocated and 2 CPUs (I normally run 2GB or 4GB and 2 CPUs without any speed issues). It's a very fast Intel machine, and normally Windows 10 just screams on it. When I did some looking around, I seem to get regular spikes in hard disk utilization to 100%, but no applications are running, and the data throughput according to Task Manager is very low - the top users at that moment are using say .2MB/s. I have attached a picture. So I am wondering if there is an incompatibility with the Parallels disk drivers?

2.jpg
 
I also have this issue. 100% disk usage, particularly after starting/resuming a VM. However task manager shows apps doing trivial amounts of MB/s usage. Way below the capabilities of my external non-SSD external hard drive.
 
Hi @DonA2 , Please refer the article to run chkdsk on Windows virtual machine, reboot Windows virtual machine and if the issue still persists please disable Windows defender and check if you experience any changes.
 
Chkdsk did not help, I rebooted many times since the problem first began, and it is not Defender. I know this too as you can see in the above graphic of the tasks, Defender is not even running - it is not the culprit when the disk gets to 99%.
 
DonA2 said:
Chkdsk did not help, I rebooted many times since the problem first began, and it is not Defender. I know this too as you can see in the above graphic of the tasks, Defender is not even running - it is not the culprit when the disk gets to 99%.
Click to expand...
Please follow the steps from this Microsoft article and check if it helps.
 
Actually so far I have already had one instance of the same issue. I brought up Quicken, I had task manager up too. Quicken actually gets a status of "not responding", while the system process is pegged at 100% disk even though the data usage is something like 0.1 MB/sec. So I am skeptical that this is the issue. Are there any thoughts from Parallels that it could be their issue instead of pointing us to these other areas, since this worked perfectly for years before version 14? IMHO this has gone way too long being unaddressed.
 
I changed the MSISupported setting back to 1. Maybe its just coincidence, but performance is way worse after the reboot. Quicken took 10 seconds to come up, just typing regedit and then enter, it took 10 seconds for the regedit screen to come up. Double clicking on MSISupported took 7 seconds to come up. Meanwhile, disk access is pegged.
 
The chkdsk "workaround" had some effect, now booting Windows 10 doesn't take almost 5 min anymore but "only" almost 2 min, still about 3 times longer tahn before the upgrade to PD14. When it is finally up and running, it's incredibly slow. It mostly takes 2-3 sec to show the Start Menu when I click on the Window Icon. Starting Chrome takes about 5 sec. I see the same Disk Usage 100% as described above and so I tried the Microsoft regedit workaround. No effect at all. So I switched back to "1".
I really, really regret the upgrade. Shouldn't have believed Parallels and should have stayed on the old version. I don't care too much about the wasted money. The effectively unusable virtual machines are what is frustrating me.
 
I will appreciate some help here too--having the same issue. Things are much more laggy than they used to be. I tried the regedit option, and it not improve the situation. In fact, as was mentioned above, I found it to be worse.
 
I also have the same issue and is a shame that I need to upgrade to Parallels 17 with any guarantee that the problem will be solved.
 
Suddenly my Windows 10 on Parallels has gotten extremely slow. I have the i9 2019 iMac with 64GB of RAM and 2TB SSD, with the Vega 48 internal and AMD 5700XT external. I had my Windows 10 using 8 processors and never had any issues with it. Suddenly today things have gotten very slow. Even the Windows 10 settings app sometimes gets "lag". I click on Updates for example, and wait a few seconds and it finally shows up.
Visual Studio has gotten absolutely horrible. I had to bump its up to 12 processors in Parallels settings, but its still at 100% CPU for a minute or two before VS is usable. Also, when I started Parallels for the first time today, my network failed to work. I tried various things, but what ultimately worked was unchecking "Connect Mac to this network" and checking it again for a Shared adapter omegleazar.
Has anyone had this issue happen? I already tried reinstalling Parallels 15, but its still a bit sluggish. Even the browsers are slow. Even the Windows 10 starting animation with the dots going in a circle is very sluggish where this never happened before.
 
Breaking news: for now I have solved the issue, moving the .PVM file in a new directory under Documents. Before it was under Macintosh HD directly, and I saw that upgrading to Big Sur the root directory was moved under System in a protected area. Also, I have disabled Time Machine on that new directory.
 
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