Solve Parallels Virtual Machines Mac Sloooowness

Sometimes I need to boot Window on my Mac. I'm using Parallels 7 for booting my BootCamp Windows 7 installation.
I know there's a new version of Parallels, but I'm not buying a new one for now. Did this since version 4, and it seems as if Parallels got slower every version. This could also be the fault of windows.

Booting windows 7 on my parallels machine slowed down my complete Machine drasticly!!
I played with options optimize for Mac, or for Host. No difference.
I trimmed down the looks of my Windows 7, so it looks like pre-XP.
I even blamed Avira Antivirus..

After doing some testing I found out it is not the CPU that's loaded, but the bottleneck seemed to be IO..

Windows Vista and Windows 7 make use of a superfetch function the preloads data in memory smartly when booting the machine. This is NOT what I want on my Virtual Machine!
Please do not use up all my memory...

I found a BIG gain in performance (of My Mac) by disabling the service:

  • Control Panel
  • Administrative Tools
  • Services
  • Stop the service "Superfetch" en set it to Manual
    • This worked great for me!
      (Btw I also disabled the indexing of my complete C drive)

Mac OS X Lion hangs on boot

I've got a very grumpy Lion version... Once ever 2/3 boots it hangs
on startup...

Lion is almost booted and shows a white screen with the Apple inside.
But 15-20 minutes later the image is the same. (I never waited longer, so maybe it's still booting).

The next boot it just works again...

After inspecting the log files I see this logged on the end (the last log item of the previous boot)

Sep  5 19:12:05 MacCreature mds[48]: (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterWrangler: 0x7fc21bc4ddc0> still waiting for plug-in info from mdworker
Sep  5 19:12:06 MacCreature mds[48]: (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterWrangler: 0x7fc21bc92710> still waiting for plug-in info from mdworker

MDS seems to be the spotlight indexer...

Plugins

The message tells me its waiting for a plugin. (not which plugin).

I've tried to move all plugins I do not use. Well I only use spotlight to quickly start apps and find filenames or search textfiles. So I disabled ALL plugins:

mkdir /Library/Spotlight/Disabled
mv /Library/Spotlight/*.mdimporter /Library/Spotlight/Disabled

That went well..
Rebooting (a few times): still the same issue
Bad luck

Disabling Indexing Service

View the status of the indexing service, for all (-a) drives.

sudo mdutil -s -a

Disable indexing for all drives

sudo mdutil -a -i off

Erase all indices.

sudo mdutil -a -E

Remove the true file. Doing this 'forgets' all your spotlight setttings
WARNING: Remember all your spotlight exclusions!!

cd /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1
sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

Turn back on indexing (And put the exclusion back on)

sudo mdutil -i on /

Disable Mobile Backups

Not required for my problem, but I don't like these mobile backups. I've got a rsync script to a local server and use an external harddisk every week.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

It seem to have worked....
Now cross my fingers. I hate Windows-like issues on my Mac!! :S


The complete failing bootlog was:

05-09-11 19:08:15,000 bootlog: BOOT_TIME 1315242495 0
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Darwin Kernel Version 11.1.0: Tue Jul 26 16:07:11 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1699.22.81~1/RELEASE_X86_64
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: vm_page_bootstrap: 941374 free pages and 33474 wired pages
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: kext submap [0xffffff7f8072e000 - 0xffffff8000000000], kernel text [0xffffff8000200000 - 0xffffff800072e000]
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: zone leak detection enabled
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: standard timeslicing quantum is 10000 us
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: mig_table_max_displ = 72
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=0 LocalApicId=0 Enabled
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=1 LocalApicId=1 Enabled
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: calling mpo_policy_init for TMSafetyNet
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Security policy loaded: Safety net for Time Machine (TMSafetyNet)
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: calling mpo_policy_init for Sandbox
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Security policy loaded: Seatbelt sandbox policy (Sandbox)
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: calling mpo_policy_init for Quarantine
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Security policy loaded: Quarantine policy (Quarantine)
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: MAC Framework successfully initialized
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: using 16384 buffer headers and 10240 cluster IO buffer headers
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: IOAPIC: Version 0x11 Vectors 64:87
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: ACPI: System State [S0 S3 S4 S5] (S3)
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement: (built 13:08:12 Jun 18 2011) initialization complete
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: PFM64 0xf10000000, 0xf0000000
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: [ PCI configuration begin ]
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: console relocated to 0xf10030000
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: PCI configuration changed (bridge=6 device=3 cardbus=0)
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: [ PCI configuration end, bridges 7 devices 19 ]
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: FireWire (OHCI) Lucent ID 5901 built-in now active, GUID 002332fffec9f878; max speed s800.
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: mbinit: done [64 MB total pool size, (42/21) split]
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Pthread support ABORTS when sync kernel primitives misused
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib kmod start
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless kmod start
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: handsoff: os version is 10.7
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib load succeeded
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless load succeeded
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient: ready
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: BTCOEXIST off 
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: wl0: Broadcom BCM432b 802.11 Wireless Controller
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: 5.100.98.75
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: [IOBluetoothHCIController::setConfigState] calling registerService
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: rooting via boot-uuid from /chosen: F58F69CF-CB44-3EC7-96CD-2E70F97504AA
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Waiting on <dict ID="0"><key>IOProviderClass</key><string ID="1">IOResources</string><key>IOResourceMatch</key><string ID="2">boot-uuid-media</string></dict>
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Got boot device = IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/SATA@B/AppleMCP79AHCI/PRT0@0/IOAHCIDevice@0/AppleAHCIDiskDriver/IOAHCIBlockStorageDevice/IOBlockStorageDriver/Hitachi HTS725050A9A364 Media/IOGUIDPartitionScheme/Mac OS X@2
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: BSD root: disk0s2, major 14, minor 2
05-09-11 19:08:25,000 kernel: Kernel is LP64
05-09-11 19:08:17,083 com.apple.launchd: *** launchd[1] has started up. ***
05-09-11 19:08:24,422 com.apple.launchd: (com.parallels.desktop.launchdaemon) Unknown key for boolean: HopefullyExitsFirst
05-09-11 19:08:24,422 com.apple.launchd: (com.stclairsoft.AppTamerAgent) Unknown key for string: Version
05-09-11 19:08:24,422 com.apple.launchd: (com.stclairsoft.AppTamerAgent) Unknown key: Version
05-09-11 19:08:26,608 UserEventAgent: starting CaptiveNetworkSupport as SystemEventAgent built Jun 13 2011 17:29:21
05-09-11 19:08:26,612 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CreateInterfaceWatchList:2788 WiFi Devices Found. :)
05-09-11 19:08:26,612 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CaptivePublishState:1211 en1 - PreProbe
05-09-11 19:08:26,612 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CaptiveSCRebuildCache:81 Failed to get service order
05-09-11 19:08:26,613 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CaptiveSCRebuildCache:81 Failed to get service order
05-09-11 19:08:26,613 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CaptivePublishState:1211 en1 - PreProbe
05-09-11 19:08:26,613 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CaptiveSCRebuildCache:81 Failed to get service order
05-09-11 19:08:26,613 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CaptiveSCRebuildCache:81 Failed to get service order
05-09-11 19:08:26,955 UserEventAgent: CertsKeychainMonitor: configuring
05-09-11 19:08:27,000 kernel: NVEthernet: Ethernet address 00:23:32:c9:f8:78
05-09-11 19:08:27,000 kernel: AirPort_Brcm4331: Ethernet address 00:23:12:54:97:49
05-09-11 19:08:27,000 kernel: IO80211Controller::dataLinkLayerAttachComplete():  adding AppleEFINVRAM notification
05-09-11 19:08:28,829 com.apple.SecurityServer: Session 100000 created
05-09-11 19:08:28,975 airportd: _processDLILEvent: en1 attached (down)
05-09-11 19:08:29,000 kernel: Created virtif 0xffffff800cc57e00 p2p0
05-09-11 19:08:29,245 com.apple.SecurityServer: Entering service
05-09-11 19:08:29,000 kernel: AGC: 3.0.7b1, HW version=1.7.3, flags:0, features:4
05-09-11 19:08:29,000 kernel: NVDANV50HAL loaded and registered.
05-09-11 19:08:29,343 UserEventAgent: CaptiveNetworkSupport:CaptivePublishState:1211 en1 - PreProbe
05-09-11 19:08:29,683 UserEventAgent: ServermgrdRegistration cannot load config data
05-09-11 19:08:30,000 kernel: AirPort: Link Down on en1. Reason 8 (Disassociated because station leaving).
05-09-11 19:08:30,000 kernel: NVDANV50HAL loaded and registered.
05-09-11 19:08:30,000 kernel: Previous Shutdown Cause: 5
05-09-11 19:08:30,000 kernel: DSMOS has arrived
05-09-11 19:08:30,382 com.apple.pfctl: No ALTQ support in kernel
05-09-11 19:08:30,382 com.apple.pfctl: ALTQ related functions disabled
05-09-11 19:08:30,538 com.apple.ucupdate.plist: ucupdate: Checked 1 update, no match found.
05-09-11 19:08:31,000 kernel: 00000000  00000020  NVEthernet::setLinkStatus - not Active
05-09-11 19:08:31,535 UserEventAgent: get_backup_share_points no AFP
05-09-11 19:08:32,000 kernel: Ethernet [nvenet]: Link up on en0, 100-Megabit, Full-duplex, Symmetric flow-control, Debug [796d,0000,0de1,0005,45e1,0000]
05-09-11 19:08:32,000 kernel: 05f5e100  00500026  NVEthernet::setLinkStatus - Active
05-09-11 19:08:32,000 kernel: Ethernet [nvenet]: Link up on en0, 100-Megabit, Full-duplex, Symmetric flow-control, Debug [796d,0000,0de1,0005,45e1,0000]
05-09-11 19:08:32,000 kernel: 05f5e100  00500026  NVEthernet::setLinkStatus - Active
05-09-11 19:08:32,000 kernel: macx_swapon SUCCESS
05-09-11 19:08:34,682 configd: bootp_session_transmit: bpf_write(en1) failed: Network is down (50)
05-09-11 19:08:34,682 configd: DHCP en1: INIT-REBOOT transmit failed
05-09-11 19:08:36,854 Parallels: Loading kernel extension  prl_hypervisor.kext
05-09-11 19:08:37,322 com.apple.usbmuxd: usbmuxd-211 built on May 16 2011 at 00:14:56 on May 16 2011 at 00:14:55, running 64 bit
05-09-11 19:08:37,322 configd: setting hostname to "MacCreature.local"
05-09-11 19:08:37,335 configd: network configuration changed.
05-09-11 19:08:40,711 systemkeychain: done file: /var/run/systemkeychaincheck.done
05-09-11 19:08:41,537 rpcsvchost: sandbox_init: com.apple.msrpc.netlogon.sb succeeded
05-09-11 19:08:43,039 com.apple.launchd: (com.apple.netbiosd[72]) Exited abnormally: Hangup: 1
05-09-11 19:08:44,906 loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
05-09-11 19:08:45,324 configd: network configuration changed.
05-09-11 19:08:46,000 kernel: NTFS driver 3.8 [Flags: R/W].
05-09-11 19:08:47,111 mds: (Normal) FMW: FMW 0 0
05-09-11 19:08:48,745 Parallels: Loading kernel extension  prl_hid_hook.kext
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: /drv/ HypApic.c:230   Host APIC  phy 0xFEE00000  lin 0xffffff80795cd000  ver 0x14
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: /drv/ HypVtd.c:3718   [vtdInit]
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: /drv/ HypVtd.c:3734   [vtdInit] VTD initialization disabled
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: /drv/ HypLowCache.c:173   Low cache initialized (6848 kB for 8 VMs on 4096 MB)
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: /drv/ HypSMBios.c:54   Failed to find SMBios entry point
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: /drv/ HypModule.c:174   Parallels IPI irq = 0 ipi = 0(0x0)
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: /drv/ HypModule.c:181   Parallels Hypervisor 6.0.12094.676494 loaded.
05-09-11 19:08:49,000 kernel: NTFS volume name BOOTCAMP, version 3.1.
05-09-11 19:08:50,049 Parallels: Loading kernel extension  prl_usb_connect.kext
05-09-11 19:08:51,000 kernel: /prl_hid/ Parallels HID Helper started.
05-09-11 19:08:55,030 Parallels: Trying to load kernel extensions, exit status: 0
05-09-11 19:08:55,034 Parallels: Starting Parallels networking...
05-09-11 19:08:55,000 kernel: nstat_lookup_entry failed: 2
05-09-11 19:08:55,215 Parallels: Loading kernel extension  prl_netbridge.kext
05-09-11 19:08:55,465 UserEventAgent: ServermgrdRegistration cannot load config data
05-09-11 19:08:55,465 UserEventAgent: ServermgrdRegistration oldConfig is nil during net changed notification
05-09-11 19:08:56,817 Parallels: Loading kernel extension  prl_vnic.kext
05-09-11 19:08:57,000 kernel: com.parallels.kext.prlnet 6.0.12094.676494 has started.
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: 0        0 AppleUSBCDC: start - initDevice failed
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,000 kernel: No interval found for . Using 8000000
05-09-11 19:08:58,038 UserEventAgent: servermgr_certs[11] -[CertsRequestHandler(HelperAdditions) identitiesFromKeychain:]:	SecItemCopyMatching (err = -25300)
05-09-11 19:08:59,000 kernel: com.parallels.kext.vnic 6.0.12094.676494 has started.
05-09-11 19:09:00,279 mDNSResponder: mDNSResponder mDNSResponder-320.5.1 (Aug  3 2011 19:57:38) starting OSXVers 11
05-09-11 19:09:08,423 com.apple.UserEventAgent-System: SecItemCopyMatching: Het opgegeven onderdeel komt niet voor in de sleutelhanger.
05-09-11 19:09:08,435 UserEventAgent: servermgr_certs[11] -[CertsRequestHandler(HelperAdditions) identitiesFromKeychain:]:	SecItemCopyMatching (err = -25300)
05-09-11 19:09:08,435 com.apple.UserEventAgent-System: SecItemCopyMatching: Het opgegeven onderdeel komt niet voor in de sleutelhanger.
05-09-11 19:09:08,436 UserEventAgent: CertsKeychainMonitor: ready to process keychain & timer events
05-09-11 19:12:05,281 mds: (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterWrangler: 0x7fc21bc4ddc0> still waiting for plug-in info from mdworker
05-09-11 19:12:06,463 mds: (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterWrangler: 0x7fc21bc92710> still waiting for plug-in info from mdworker