stops periodically in VMware Workstation

I have been a bit anoyed about my host and virtual machines pausing for a few seconds, and pretty frequently. I code on my virtual machine, and all those pauses was hurting my productivity a lot. An old colleague heard at a VMware course that it could be because of the fact that if the computer is dual core and the virtual machine is set to use both cores, then BOTH cores must be available everytime cpu is needed from client. This might be the problem for some, and setting VMware to use 1 CPU core for clients may help, but for me it did not.

I ended up finding the solution online. It’s quite simple – only a line needs to be added to the virtual machine .vmx configuration line. Add the following line:

mainmem.useNamedFile = false

The pauses should stop now, and it does not matter if you use 1 or 2 cores on clients.

From what I read this config line should only change the place the swapped memory for the client is placed, but it did the trick for me somehow. I have read this has helped others too.