vmware player on exit, disks run 10x slower till reboot

[rocket777]

Once I run a vm system via vmplayer, and then exit, my disk copy throughput drops to about 3-4 meg/sec in and out, so a copy of the vm folder takes almost 10 times longer, about 15 minutes for the copy.

I've got a win2k system, and a win2k virtual machine that I run inside. I've got an intel mobo DG965WH and a core2/duo. I have 3 sata drives and one ide drive.

This slowdown lasts until I reboot. logoff/on won't help.

After bootup, w/o the vm running or having been started yet, I can copy large files (e.g. the vm folder with the virtual disk files) between disks and explorer can copy about 30-40meg in and 30-40 meg out (as per sysinternals procexp) and it will typically take about 2 minutes to copy 3-4 gigs.


I've checked to see if pio mode has been set on any of the ide controllers, and none have changed. No events logged on any drives, and they are fairly new drives. s.m.a.r.t-numbers all look ok.

I can run a low level disk diag, HDDScan (from the mhdd author) which will still do reads on each of my disks at about 60megs/second in read mode - not verify mode - so it is actually reading into memory.

So, the only thing I can point to is the running of vmware player and some level of disk i/o software that is above what the diag uses. (Both using explorer and another file copy program slow down equally).

Any ideas?

 

[jtb]

have you checked your task manager to make certain there are no VMware components still in memory?

Please describe your PC in more detail. What CPU/mobo/chipset, how much memory? what disks? Are all of your hardware on the W3K HCL? Do you have all of the latest patches, etc.?

kinda like calling your doctor on the phone and asking him to tell you if you're running a fever...


JTB
Have Certs, Will Travel
"A knight without armour in a [cyber] land."

 

[rocket777]

Thanks for the reply.

Since I posted, I discovered that the problem lasts only for about 5-6 minutes. I can reboot and it's fixed immediately.

What's going on is that when I close vmplayer, I can see a value for Mapped File Write Delta is non-zero. This is usually 0 but remains steady for the 5-6 minutes with values on the order of 50. While this is going on, all copies of files are very slow. When this drops to 0 again, the system resumes its normal rate of disk transfer.

My guess is that the vmplayer virtual disk is being flushed out, but I don't see why it takes so long. Anyway, now that the problem is only short lived, and I don't need to reboot, I guess I'll just learn to live with it.