vmware workstation is beating up my disk!

[David Timms]

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.