Temp VMWare Server Performance Headache
Posted by Vincent Woo
I highly recommend VMware Server. It’s free and a great way to get a Linux environment for rails development without sacrificing Windows apps. The installation was fast and smooth but, due to some bad configuration on my part, the cpu loads were hovering around 3 when it should be 1. Needless to say, waiting minutes for konsole to open up was…unpleasant.
Strangely enough, the problem was due to allocating too much memory to the VM. In the VMWare Server Console, under:
VM -> Settings… -> Hardware tab -> Memory for this virtual machine
don’t go above the maximum recommended memory listed there. Recommendation too low? Then set:
Host -> Settings… -> Memory tab -> Reserved Memory
to your desired VM memory size plus at least 100MB. This is with one VM so YMMV. While you’re there, don’t forget to set “Additional memory” to “Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM”.
After this change, the speed performance returned to normal and I could finally fire up RadRails and get some work done.
