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.
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Cheers – I have tried this, works on one of my VMs, and yet it doesnt work on another which is a direct clone of the first. Crazy. Thanks for the tip though.
OMG thanks so much.
I’ve been driven half mad with using a E6410 w/ i5 host pc, and both the vOS and the Host OS would completely freeze for 15 seconds at a time, completely ruining my productivity, esp since I was running certain Admin functions in the vm.
It’s only been about 5 min since I implemented your suggested change, so it might be a bit pre-mature to celebrate, but normally I could have expected at least one freeze within the first 2 minutes of firing up the vm, so nearing now 6 minutes is 300% longer than my ‘normal’ experience.
Been googling the issue for weeks and reading articles and forums, but had not seen this recommendation before finding your post.
Thank you so very much!
Cheers
You are very welcome.
I can’t seem to figure out why only some of us experience this.
.
I have to do this with every VM I make, and even other peoples VMs.
I work for a sharepoint consultant company, and there’s a guy who creates the images for us to save us all time.
I’m the only one I have heard of that is doing this.
If I don’t I experience the same as you, and it completely ruins me mojo
Ditto “OMG thanks so much”….I’ve been having these issues for months and had gotten nowhere in figuring out the problem…today my VM was so horrible I figured I’d go on one more Google-quest and this was the first result. I made the vmx file modification, and she runs like a top now.
Thanks for solving a deep mystery, and please pass it back to whomever you got it from originally.
You are quite welcome.
Unfortunately I can’t pass it back to anyone. This was one of those “Search like a maniac with a bazillion open windows” kind of thing for me, and ended up loosing the original url.
I would have lost my mind without it
Big thumbs up! Works great on VM Workstation 8.0.
Every few minutes the VM would freexe for about 10 seconds. This fix solves it, a big time saver.
Thx Code-Journey!
You are very welcome. I felt I was getting mad myself, since so many didn’t seem to have the issue
.
same issue here. I ran 4 virtual machines 2 servers and 2 workstation. I had workstation 7.1, got tired of waiting for the machines to respond, so I unistalled 7.1 and installed v 8.0, and for my surprise the issues where still there and even worse, tried the conf. line and now Im back on business
Thanks a lot!!!!!
You are very welcome Felipe. Glad it helped.
I keep coming back to my old post here when I make new VMs
Thank you so much for this post.
BUT EVERYONE PLEASE NOTE
It should be added to the .vmx as NOT as
mainmem.useNamedFile = false
but add it as
mainmem.useNamedFile = “FALSE”
It gave me some errors when i tried false without quotes.
HTH,
Jack.
Hi Jack,
Thanks for the correction. I have edited the post.
Best Regards,
Thomas