Permanently killing 'copypaste' and 'prldragdrop'

D

DavidS13

Member
A huge Parallels bug that's gone unfixed for years are the two processes, copypaste and prldragdrop, which consume 100% of CPU resources on the Mac OSX guest VM. What causes the processes to spiral out of control is unknown but it typically happens when I have two users logged on to the same guest VM at one time.

I've posted about this before and knowing that I'd never get a response, I wrote a script to kill these two processes each and every time I login to the guest VM:

killall prldragdrop
killall copypaste

But now, since "upgrading" to Parallels 13 from 11 I noticed these useless, productivity-killing processes seem to resurrect themselves and once again consume 100% of all CPU resources. Is there any way to terminate these processes permanently or better yet, is there a setting that would prevent them from even starting in the first place?
 
I imagine that article would be of tremendous value to someone running a Windows VM (which, as you can see from my post, I'm not) or struggling with the prl_vm_app process (which, as you can see from my post, I'm not).
 
DavidS13 said:
I imagine that article would be of tremendous value to someone running a Windows VM (which, as you can see from my post, I'm not) or struggling with the prl_vm_app process (which, as you can see from my post, I'm not).
Click to expand...

Thank you for your response we try to sort out with this problem
You can try to use only one user logged in guest, i think this helps to avoid problem.
 
Clipboard completely stops working after killing the processes... (Parallels 14.x), so this does not help much
 
+1 for this. I can see that this was last touched upon in September. Any resolution? I often use parallels with macOS guest hosts to test deployments for multiple users, and this issue with copypaste and prldragdrop is an issue, as I often have multiple users logged in on the guest vm.
 
In my case, since using Parallels 14, in my Snow Leopard Server VM there was a small rectangular area in the middle of the VM window. It was transparent and almost invisible (the rectangle was a bit lighter in colour than what was covered by it, maybe 1 % or so). The cursor would respond to any object in that small area and change its cursor "icon" accordingly, but clicking didn't have any effect on an object in that area (no matter whether it was a file, link, some object in a layout software ...).

Googling for a solution didn't even bring up anyone reporting a similar problem. So for a long time I didn't know where this problem came from until today when I realised I could use Accessibility Inspector to investigate it. And AI revealed that it was prldragdrop that was "occupying" that small rectangular area in the middle of my VM window.

"killall prldragdrop", as suggested by the OP, fixed it for the moment. But as long term solution, after killing it, I actually zipped the binary and removed the original so when the VM is started it can't be executed in the first place:
Code: 
killall prldragdrop
sudo zip /Library/Parallels\ Guest\ Tools/prldragdrop.zip /Library/Parallels\ Guest\ Tools/prldragdrop
sudo rm /Library/Parallels\ Guest\ Tools/prldragdrop


So far I didn't notice any difference in behaviour of the VM. If I should, I'll try using prldragdrop from an older Parallels version and see if that works.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top