For some reason, My VM has become really tediously slow. The host is Windows 2003 x86 SP2 running VMware Server 1.0.3. The guest runs Windows XP SP2.
For a while it's been running at normal speed, which is slow. Screen updates is about 1fps, but the rest is good and workable. Funny thing is, screen updates bumps to about 20fps when I move the mouse??! I hope the mouse is not considered the only input device that needs a responsive UI?? I mean, come on, I have gigabit network here. I'm certain VMware can do 100fps continuously with this kind of bandwidth. At least Remote desktop works MUCH more responsive, even when not moving the mouse.
Anyhow, now comes the really biting part... At this moment the VM is running so slow I can't even work with it. The VM misses 3 out of every 4 mouseclicks, some keystrokes are missed, screen updates is less than 0.5fps and most of them are partial, and the CPU seems like a P200 or something. On the server, nothing strange is going on. Plenty free memory, plenty CPU time unused. Ditto on the guest. The harddisk is nearly idle, and network shouldn't cause performance problems, as mentioned earlier.
In the past, I could solve this by rebooting the guest, but that trick no longer works. I'm certainly not going to reboot the server just for this, therefor I need a graceful solution.
So here come the questions:
1) Why is VMware so slow when running at "normal" speed?
2) Why does the guest become so unworkable and tediously slow for no reason?