Major performance issues with V10 on virtualized Windows 7

[ashtontreadway]

I'm using V10 with Windows 7 Enterprise through VMWare Fusion, and I am seeing absolutely terrible behavior: endless (Not Responding) messages, UI redraws taking several seconds, complete paralytic lockups at arbitrary intervals, and the like.

What kind of virtualization environment should I be giving Flare? Is anyone else running into these types of issues?

It's making Flare nearly unusable for me, and I know there are people out there who are running Flare without issues on more or less the same environment, so I'd appreciate some guidance along the lines of "here's what I'm doing".

[Nita Beck]

I'm using Flare 10.1 on Win7 on VMWare and usually have no issue. I had been having the problems you describe with Flare 10.0 and Flare 10.0.1, but only under very specific circumstances having to do with a cloud-based SVN server using ssh+svn. The problem is much diminished with Flare 10.1 but alas still not completely resolved for me. With other SVN protocols, or with projects that are not under source control, Flare 10.1 behaves well for me on my virtual machine. Also, others who had reported issues with Flare 10 and SVN do report relief with Flare 10.1. I think that you should contact MadCap support to relay your problem. Clearly Flare isn't coping with something.

[RamonS]

My recommendation would be not to run Flare in a virtual environment if at all possible. I run plenty of VMs for testing purposes and especially disk I/O performance is dismal. I only get decent VM performance on a beefy server with striped local disk arrays.
Given that you use Fusion I assume you are running the VM on OS X? Which Mac model is that? We use a few of the compact models that all include only the noticeably slow 5k4 RPM laptop drives with little cache. Also, give the VM plenty of RAM to use (in the range of 6 to 8 GB), preallocate the virtual disk space, defragment within the virtual W7, and make sure that you have plenty of virtual disk space to spare. And again, give the VM more RAM. Once Windows starts swapping out memory to disk within a VM performance is nil.
Oh, and check if you have the VMWare tools installed properly and if you run the latest graphics driver on the host.

[Ineffable]

I'm using V10 with Windows 7 Enterprise through VMWare Fusion, and I am seeing absolutely terrible behavior: endless (Not Responding) messages, UI redraws taking several seconds, complete paralytic lockups at arbitrary intervals, and the like.

What kind of virtualization environment should I be giving Flare? Is anyone else running into these types of issues?

It's making Flare nearly unusable for me, and I know there are people out there who are running Flare without issues on more or less the same environment, so I'd appreciate some guidance along the lines of "here's what I'm doing".

Are you running the 32- or 64-bit version? I've had issues with 64-bit. Also, Enterprise uses the BitLocker encryption. If you have that enabled, you might want to try disabling to speed disk I/O, as referenced in another post.