Saturated I/O after shutting down VM

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Possible Duplicate:
VMWare Player slows down computer after exit

Often, when I suspend a vmware virtual machine, my disk IO is saturated for a few minutes and it makes the computer unusable until it's finished. (This is after VMware has actually quit, not while it has the saving progress bar up). The virtual machine is only set to use around 3gb of my 8gb, so it's not a swapping issue.

The host os is Windows 7, and the Guest is Ubuntu 11.10 x64.

I took a screenshot which shows the resource monitor while this is happening - interestingly, it's not actually vmware itself that's writing to the file.enter image description here

This is a problem I've had on two completely different machines when using VMware, so I'd be keen to resolve it or at least figure out what's happening!

Jords

Posted 2012-03-11T11:03:31.653

Reputation: 143

Question was closed 2012-10-02T22:37:30.350

This is probably the OS flushing the dirty buffers to disk, basically completing the writes. It shouldn't make your computer unusable though. Tell us more about your physical disk hardware. Why is your disk so slow and why does I/O consume so much CPU? It looks like an old EIDE controller in PIO mode! – David Schwartz – 2012-03-11T12:34:30.683

This is the Asus N55SF laptop - so modern - i7 sandy bridge 2670QM with a 7200rpm hdd. Just ran crystaldiskmark and I get decent numbers (c.100MB/s sequential) so I think what your seeing there is just all the uploads from insync causing the disk to thrash. The cpu usage is strange though, wonder if it's because the cpu has stepped down? – Jords – 2012-03-11T12:55:12.400

So the disk thrashing would to some extent explain the performance issue, but that seems pretty extreme. The disk I/O seems to be buffer flushing. You can see that in the bottom panel. Maybe the disk cache is too large? Did you customize/tune any VM or cache parameters? – David Schwartz – 2012-03-11T12:58:11.667

I see the same issue on my ASUS Zenbook. The machine becomes almost completely unresponsive while the VM state is being flushed to disk. Even the reaction to Ctrl-Alt-Delete gets delayed. – ncoghlan – 2012-05-20T14:14:07.353

Yeah, I never found a good solution to this, ended up just dual booting instead. Virtualbox didn't have this issue for me so that could be worth a try too. – Jords – 2012-05-20T23:15:02.983

Answers

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The top IO on that chart is your VM file. While it isn't VMware.exe per se, System represents many other components, not just the OS. Services also fall under System.

I'm also curious what is "unstable." Usually, unstable means it is crashing. I have a four year old HP and a 5400 HD on Vista that is still quite stable when I close VMware.

surfasb

Posted 2012-03-11T11:03:31.653

Reputation: 21 453

It's not unstable, it's unusable - ie extremely slow when I do anything that requires disk access, until it finishes. – Jords – 2012-03-11T23:17:35.567

Asked: 2012-03-11T11:03:31.653

Viewed: 741 times

Active: 2012-03-11T19:11:54.413