Very Slow Startup for Parallels 5

Same issue for me

When starting the virtual machine it hangs at 60% progress for about 10 minutes and then starts.

During this time my computer is pretty much completely frozen with all system resources being used by parallels.

I submitted a trouble report #773510.

Please advise.

Joe
 
Thank you everyone for posting problem reports. We take this issue seriously and eager to investigate and fix it as soon as possible.

The issue is registered as #456791 in our internal issue tracker. Please visit this thread from time to time, there may be additional help required from you during the investigation.
 
Yes, we still do want reports. Please keep them coming.

Can someone please try the following two things:
1. Disable main window animation. To do this, go to Parallels Desktop menu->Preferences->Appearance tab->Animate group and uncheck the "Virtual Machine Window" option. After that quit Parallels Desktop and start it again.

If it makes no difference, please
2. Temporarily disable Time Machine on host. Quit Parallels Desktop, disable Time Machine, start Parallels Desktop. Will this improve startup time? Do not forget to re-enable Time Machine after the experiment.

Thank you very much in advance.
 
Have tried on Imac 24" 3.06Ghz and have turned off Time Machine, Window animation as suggested.
Startup seemed faster but time between Welcome screen and actual windows was still long time, then decided also to turn " pause windows when not running applications" off.....that made major difference.
Will turn Time Machine back on as I think has no impact to this.
 
Slow startup and every time I access Explorer

I do have an alias to a network share on my desktop, which does not remain connected most of the time. I have moved it around but any time I access a folder with the alias in it, the VM freezes for around a minute. Why is Parallels attempting to connect to this share, and assuming there's a good reason, why wasn't that activity programmed into a different thread so it doesn't freeze Parallels? I'm not keen on hiding the alias in some obscure folder that I will hopefully never access with the VM. I want where it's always been, on my desktop.
 
Holding pattern...

I was just about to upgrade from v4 to v5, when I thought I better scan the forum posts. Very glad I did!

Version 4 has been working great for me, but the promise of faster is always alluring ;-)

Reading all the negative posts, has caused me to wait and see... I am NOT running Snow Leopard on my machine and i only have 4GB of RAM. Are there any reports of anyone have success with the upgrade?

SL
 
I too am experiencing sluggish loading. First time I loaded it, it hung (until I left it, and it did eventually load). Though now, the actual application loads relatively quickly, but I did disable all animations since then and it seems to be going okish.

It does take ages for Windows to boot, then there's a long time before I can actually use any Windows applications (i.e. I have Windows Live Messenger set to load at startup, that takes a couple of minutes to appear, and it is generally really sluggish.

Parallels Desktop 4 worked fine, and had no issues, booted up quickly etc.

Also, there is a white line that appears just above the Dock (I'm using Coherence) and flashes and disappears. When I boot up Parallels and Windows loads, the line is there for about 5 secs then disappears. But it reappears momentarily during use.
 
Window animation

"1. Disable main window animation. To do this, go to Parallels Desktop menu->Preferences->Appearance tab->Animate group and uncheck the "Virtual Machine Window" option. After that quit Parallels Desktop and start it again."

I did that suggestion. The Effect is, that Winxp-Startup and Sleepmode is faster. BUT: Nothing changed in very long time for starting PD 5. The Icon in dock is bouncing a long time, Beachball is turning - simply annoying comparing to the earlier versions of PD.

Seems to be a serious problem for the Prallels-Programmers...
 
Thank you for your feedbacks.

Time to dig much deeper. What I am about to ask now will require some deeper knowledge of Mac OS X, but should finally shed some light on the issue.

Please:
1. Make sure that the Activity Monitor application is not running. If it is, quit it. Also please quit Parallels Desktop.
2. Open Applications->Utilities->Terminal
3. Paste the following string into Terminal and hit Enter:
Code: 
sudo /Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/Activity\ Monitor
4. Enter your password when prompted.
5. Activity Monitor window opens. Select "All Processes" in the drop-down at the top-right side of Activity Monitor window
6. Start Parallels Desktop. Wait several seconds till it starts bouncing and beachballing.
7. Find "Parallels Desktop" process in Activity Monitor's process list. Click it once to highlight.
8. Click "Sample Process" button at the top of Activity Monitor window.
9. In a while a window with text will open. Copy-paste the text into some text file and attach here. Or just copy-paste the text here at the forum.

It is important to perform steps 7-8 while the issue is in progress (the Parallels Desktop icon is bouncing and beach ball happens). This should give some technical information on what the Parallels Desktop is doing that long.

We need samples from as many different users as possible.

Thank you very much in advance.
 
Last edited:
Sampling process 646 for 3 seconds with 1 millisecond of run time between samples
Sampling completed, processing symbols...
Analysis of sampling prl_client_app (pid 646) every 1 millisecond
Call graph:
2805 Thread_16306 DispatchQueue_1: com.apple.main-thread (serial)
2805 start
2805 start
2805 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2805 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2805 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2805 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2805 MDQueryExecute
2805 _MDQueryExecute
2805 CFRunLoopRunInMode
2805 CFRunLoopRunSpecific
2805 __CFRunLoopRun
2805 mach_msg
2805 mach_msg_trap
2805 Thread_16320 DispatchQueue_2: com.apple.libdispatch-manager (serial)
2805 start_wqthread
2805 _pthread_wqthread
2805 _dispatch_worker_thread2
2805 _dispatch_queue_invoke
2805 _dispatch_mgr_invoke
2805 kevent
2805 Thread_16328
2805 thread_start
2805 _pthread_start
2805 th_set_from_stat
2805 0xf859e5f
2805 th_set_from_stat
2805 th_set_from_stat
2805 th_set_from_stat
2805 th_set_from_stat
2805 th_set_from_stat
2805 th_set_from_stat
2805 select
2805 select$DARWIN_EXTSN$NOCANCEL

Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):
7 th_set_from_stat

Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
kevent 2805
mach_msg_trap 2805
select$DARWIN_EXTSN$NOCANCEL 2805
Sample analysis of process 646 written to file /dev/stdout
 
Here my sample:

Sampling process 2809 for 3 seconds with 1 millisecond of run time between samples
Sampling completed, processing symbols...
Analysis of sampling prl_client_app (pid 2809) every 1 millisecond
Call graph:
2804 Thread_43882 DispatchQueue_1: com.apple.main-thread (serial)
2804 start
2804 start
2804 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2804 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2804 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2804 CQCViewWidget::inputKeys()
2804 MDQueryExecute
2804 _MDQueryExecute
2801 CFRunLoopRunInMode
2801 CFRunLoopRunSpecific
2801 __CFRunLoopRun
2800 mach_msg
2800 mach_msg_trap
1 __CFMachPortPerform
1 dispatch_sync
1 dispatch_barrier_sync_f
2 pthread_cond_wait$UNIX2003
2 _pthread_cond_wait
2 __semwait_signal
1 MDQueryStop
1 dispatch_sync
1 _dispatch_barrier_sync_f_slow
1 _dispatch_semaphore_wait_slow
1 semaphore_wait_trap
2804 Thread_43896 DispatchQueue_2: com.apple.libdispatch-manager (serial)
2804 start_wqthread
2804 _pthread_wqthread
2804 _dispatch_worker_thread2
2804 _dispatch_queue_invoke
2804 _dispatch_mgr_invoke
2804 kevent
2804 Thread_43900
2804 thread_start
2804 _pthread_start
2804 th_set_from_stat
2804 0x16086e5f
2804 th_set_from_stat
2804 th_set_from_stat
2804 th_set_from_stat
2804 th_set_from_stat
2804 th_set_from_stat
2804 th_set_from_stat
2804 select
2804 select$DARWIN_EXTSN$NOCANCEL
2803 Thread_43897
2803 start_wqthread
2803 _pthread_wqthread
2803 __workq_kernreturn
2803 Thread_43901
2803 start_wqthread
2802 _pthread_wqthread
2802 __workq_kernreturn
1 start_wqthread
2475 Thread_43911
2475 start_wqthread
2473 _pthread_wqthread
2473 __workq_kernreturn
2 start_wqthread
1 Thread_43897 DispatchQueue_25: Query work queue (serial)
1 start_wqthread
1 _pthread_wqthread
1 _dispatch_worker_thread2
1 _dispatch_queue_invoke
1 _dispatch_queue_drain
1 _dispatch_queue_invoke
1 _dispatch_queue_push_list_slow
1 _dispatch_wakeup
1 _dispatch_mgr_wakeup
1 _dispatch_update_kq
1 kevent
1 Thread_43901 DispatchQueue_28: Query work queue (serial)
1 start_wqthread
1 _pthread_wqthread
1 _dispatch_worker_thread2
1 _dispatch_queue_invoke
1 _dispatch_queue_drain
1 _dispatch_queue_invoke
1 _dispatch_queue_push_list_slow
1 _dispatch_wakeup
1 _dispatch_mgr_wakeup
1 _dispatch_update_kq
1 kevent
1 Thread_43911 DispatchQueue_6: com.apple.root.default-priority (serial)
1 start_wqthread
1 _pthread_wqthread
1 _dispatch_worker_thread2
1 _dispatch_call_block_and_release
1 ___MDQueryExecute_block_invoke_1
1 mdsOpenAsyncQuery
1 mach_msg
1 mach_msg_trap

Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):
7 _pthread_wqthread
7 start_wqthread
7 th_set_from_stat
5 _dispatch_queue_invoke

Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
__workq_kernreturn 8078
kevent 2806
select$DARWIN_EXTSN$NOCANCEL 2804
mach_msg_trap 2801
Sample analysis of process 2809 written to file /dev/stdout
 
Activity Monitor results

Parallels started so quickly, I didn't have time to click on Parallels in the processes list. I opened the Windows XP virtual machine, and then interesting things began to happen. The Parallels Desktop process showed little or no change. However, there was a process, prl_vm_app, that began to take all resources (104% CPU, is that possible?). I can't send teh sample now (but I will later) because I had to change computers. Everything almost froze. For the past 6 minutes my computer has been unresponsive, but it hasn't frozen completely. As I said in a previous post, none of this happens with Linux, it only happens when I open Windows XP.
 
Activity Monitor sample

For the past 30 minutes or so my computer was unusable. I finally managed to shutdown Windows from the login window. The Sample of prl_vm_app is very long (334 lines), so here are the first three and the rest is in the attached text file.

Sampling process 9331 for 3 seconds with 1 millisecond of run time between samples
Sampling completed, processing symbols...
Analysis of sampling prl_vm_app (pid 9331) every 1 millisecond
 

Attachments

An update to those watching this issue.

1. Thank you very much for your help investigating this. Without you it is nearly impossible to make any progress.

2. In this thread we are tracking a "slow Parallels Destkop startup" issue. It is observed like long Parallels Desktop icon bouncing in Dock before Parallels Desktop actually starts. If you have some other kind of "slow startup" issue like slow VM startup and excessive resources usage reported by OscarC, please create a separate thread on the issue. This issue requires separate means of investigation, better split it.

3. The samples posted helped us localize several places in code that could cause the slow startup. We again need help in determining the particular code. Can you please:
- Go to Parallels Desktop menu->Preferences->General Tab
- Select the "Use Detailed Log Messages" option.
- Quit Parallels Desktop. Start it again. Wait till it is finally started (bouncing and beachballing stops).
- Make a problem report, send it and post a problem report ID.
- Turn off the detailed log messages (otherwise your Parallels log file will grow too huge soon)

We are looking forward to report IDs. Thank you very much in advance.

PS: OscarC - can you please create a separate therad on your issue? Please do not forget to post your problem report ID.
 
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