To speed up av encoding with a multicore aware app under Windows XP, I've setup a Windows XP SP3 VM in Parallels 6 with all available cores dedicated to the VM (4 physical + 4 virtual). When I boot up the 8 core VM, all 8 cores run at 100% for some time and I hear a lot of disk activity. Booting the same VM with only 2 cores, the boot process is much faster and there is no such disk activity. I expected the VM with 8 cores to boot faster or at least not slower than with 2 cores!?! Does anybody know, what is happening here? Some excessive swap activity probably? Does the VM need additional memory for each core aside from the memory dedicated to the VM in the VM configuration. I've used 3 GB out of 12 GB physical RAM. So the Mac still sees plenty of free RAM after the VM has booted up. No need to page out RAM. The encoding itself ran much faster with 8 cores than with 2, so the app is actually utilizing 8 cores (which I see in activity monitor as well). Pete
Hi, I've noticed similar behaviour. Windows XP is booting in a blink of an eye with 1 core enabled, but waits for about 8-10 second at black screen (before logo and a progress appear) when 4 cores are dedicated to virtual machine. Regards, Kuba
