vmware workstation is beating up my disk!

[Lonni J Friedman]

On 1/16/07, John Bowden <john.bowden43 at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 10:14 +1100, David Timms wrote:
> > Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> > > On 1/16/07, Ambrogio <fn050202 at flashnet.it> wrote:
> > >> Il giorno lun, 15/01/2007 alle 12.53 -0800, Lonni J Friedman ha scritto:
> > >> > Anyone else running VMWare workstation in FC6 (x86)?  I've noticed
> > >> > that whenever vmware is running (WinXP), the disk is getting polled
> > >> > every other second non-stop.  it sounds like little men are marching
> > >> > around its so loud & annoying.  Its not a memory/swap thing as I've
> > >> > got 3GB of RAM, and vmware has access to a large chunk of it.
> > >> Try also to monitor on Linux what appens.
> > >> With top for examples, look at the swap area to see if it's used.
> > >>
> > >> With 3 GB of RAM and 2 assigned to vmware, maybe linux also swap.
> > >
> > > No, there's no swapping going on, I've already checked that.  Plus
> > > swap usage in linux shouldn't normally result in a regular pattern of
> > > disk access.
> > >
> > >>
> > >> Note also that if you have swap on Windows, the Windows kernel swap even
> > >> if they don't need to do it :-)
> > >
> > > Windows has a swap file.  I'm not sure what that would suggest with
> > > respect to this problem thoiugh.
> > Further to what Ambrogio said:
> > Come to think of it: after a while, windows machine tends to get a lot
> > of stuff in file cache, and drops some inactive {libraries} out to swap,
> > if they haven't been used for a {while}. I have seen that on normal
> > winxp usage (and you aren't touching the machine), sometimes it just
> > writes stuff to the disk, then for like a minute you hear a little disk
> > access every second or so.
> >
> > Though win warns you not to (even with GB of ram), you can set the swap
> > to be disabled, in performance options. That should put that possibility
> > to rest.
> >
> > If it's still warming your disk, perhaps see if there are any startup or
> > run/runonce registry items that can be removed, along with system tray
> > bits. Maybe forcibly do a win defrag {a fresh install is generally
> > fragmented because the installer decompresses from cd to the hard drive
> > and then installs from the hard drive to the hard drive :( }
> >
> > DaveT.
> >
> You will find that windoz will default to a swap file 1.5 times the real
> RAM, and will swap things in and out on a regular basis. Its memory
> management is still very crude compared to a nix o/s. As well as
> indexing check to see if any anti virus or mallware cleaners are
> running. Also if you have m$ office it also has an index service.

I've got no anti-virus or malware software installed (although this
does make me wonder if there's a virus at play, however this vmware
instance is behind a NAT'd firewall, and its the only Windows instance
behind the firewall, so it seems unlikely to be a virus).  I also do
not have Office installed.


-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org