The Mac is Back

Tiny post, for anyone else wondering about high CPU utilization and slow or crashing network services on their Mac while running Parallels Desktop for the Mac 3.0. I've been a happy Parallels-er, running a few critical apps on a virtual PC while doing most everything else on my Mini Mac. (Not a speed-demon, but quiet, cool, and dual core.) After the upgrade to 3.0, I found Parallels was routinely sitting on 40% of my CPU, and causing network connectivity, especially in Safari, to totally suck. I had to Force Quit Safari daily. That didn't make sense. A few other people seemed to suggest that file sharing might be the problem. I've disabled file sharing of the Windows folders into the Mac. This is a nice feature, but in practice I don't use it (or the reverse) terribly often. All my permanent files are on a central networked drive which serves both Macs and PCs in my house. Disabled the sharing, and all was better. Perhaps they'll fix this in their next patch and let me use more than 1 CPU in my virtual machine, or I'll have to join the hordes defecting to the newly rich VMWare.

Added 19 Aug 2007: It appears USB support is no picnic for Parallels either. By disabling USB devices when I'm not using them in the VM, CPU usage has dropped quite a bit also. It still sits at 13% when idle, which I find disturbing. Experiments with VMWare are ongoing.