The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    VMWare Fusion performance

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by Zedr0n, Dec 9, 2007.

  1. Zedr0n

    Zedr0n Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    21
    Messages:
    148
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    I'm using VMWare fusion 1.1 with XP Pro SP2 and I just wondered what settings do you normally use to maximize performance?

    For example, enabling the DirectX 9 support raises the CPU usage for me, but that's pretty obvious. A more subtle thing is that if I enable two virtual processors the CPU usage also raises quite substantially even when I'm not running cpu-intensive apps. Is it supposed to be like that? (I've run into this issue both on 1.0 and 1.1)

    What's the amount of ram you normally dedicate to the VM(I have 4gb overall and 1gb given winxp now). Any performance hit/gain here?

    Any comments welcome
     
  2. Lysander

    Lysander AFK, raid time.

    Reputations:
    1,553
    Messages:
    2,722
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    55
    I gave XP 1.5GB of ram, and never see CPU usage hit 10% on idle. Keep in mind I also have an Arch Linux vm running too, but that's built for a minimal footprint.
     
  3. radx

    radx Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    45
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    I don't use Dx9 in VMWare Fusion, since it works only with XP and I use Vista. But I gave it 2gb, 2 virtual cpus. Works very nicely, no visual slow down whatsoever - running in full screen mode on one of my spaces screens. Applications I run are mostly Visual Studio 2005/2008. I found that running Fusion in unity mode sometimes can be choppy.
     
  4. kgeier82

    kgeier82 Notebook Deity

    Reputations:
    129
    Messages:
    757
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    i give xp pro 1gb, seems happy. i only use vs2005 though, no need for more ram.

    i am running parallels though