Actinic Runs dead Slow on MAC under Parallels

[nileshpa]

Help please !!!

Just got a MAC pro &installed Parallels 4 with Windows XP SP2. I find Actinic running extremely slow on it, making it totally unusable. Changed the memory settings on Parallels to 2GB but still makes no difference. I'm new to MAC so any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks in Advance
Nilesh

BTW- Didn't go for VM Fusion as Sage Line50 2007 is not supported.

[nileshpa]

Sorry, forgot to mention. I'm using Actinic V9.0.5 Business edition.

Thanks
Nilesh

[Mike Hughes]

What are you doing that is slow?
Have you tried the suggested performance tune ups?

Alternatively, buy a PC.

Mike

[nileshpa]

Mike, Thanks for the reply.

The MACbook Pro is only 2 days old & I'm porting my applications over to it, simply by installing the software & restoring from backup. Went for MacBook pro as I want to run other MAC apps & not tied down to a desktop PC. The only real apps I use that needs XP running on the Macbook is Actinic & Sage Line50.

Sage seems to be working so far in Parallels but its Actinic 9.0.5 that is very, very sluggish. Startup takes a good 3-4 minutes to come to life. Moving from page to page takes a good minute or two. Invoked a PreviewStore to test it but gave up after half an hour with Actinic having checked about 100 HTML pages out of 2330. However, the same Actinic WebSite on my DELL Server with 2GB memory seems to work fine & PreviewSite takes about 20 mins.

I'm not sure what Performance Tune ups I need to do from both, Actinic & Parallels side.

Nilesh

[carbontwelve]

Have you tried downloading the demo of vm fusion to see if the problem persists on that?

Also I don't understand why vm fusion wouldnt support Sage Line50 2007, its a virtual hardware emulation layer to run opperating systems on, if an application will run under windows xp normally it should have no difference on windows xp within vmware.

If you open up the task manager within xp is it showing as using 100% processors? If not, is something else running on your mac using its resources, osx has its own "task manager" which would be inside your applications >> utilities folder. That would be my first port of call in determining what the cause was.

If its 100% under xp then either actinic is screwing you around or for some unknown reason Parallels is getting confused (because actinic is screwing it around). If once installed on vmware fusion the same thing happens then it is actinic that is at fault and sorry but you will be waiting a long time for a solution.

However if there is something other than Parallels using 100% processor under osx then the problem will lie with that. With vmware fusion I give xp one of my two dual core processors and 4GB of RAM, effectively spliting the computer into two live systems, I believe the same can be done with Parallels, therefore if you have told it to use only one of your cores and you have a quad core system (or two dual cores) you should under osx's task manager only see 25% overall usage, if else and its Parallels using more than it should, check your settings in Parallels, if they are fine then again it is actinic breaking parallels.

If I remember I shall install actinic on my copy of xp running under vmware when I get back home to save you having to download a huge application on the basis that its not actinic at fault.

[nileshpa]

Thanks Simon for your comprehensive suggestions. Have taken these onboard and going to try them one at a time. I think it will be a lot of trial & error runs to get it ported across. At least it will be one way to learn & get use to Apple MAC.

With regards to Sage, I am told only 2008 onwards is supported on VmWare Fusion. Upgrade to later versions of Sage is almost the price of a decent laptop.

Nilesh

[MJS]

I use Parallels 4 with XP on my 8 core Mac Pro 8Gb RAM and to be honest I have found that Parallels runs best with 512mb ram and single core allocation.
Any more than this and everything seems to slow down, but with my current settings windows is so fast, no PC can even touch it.

Also try turning off application sharing in preferences as this can really slow things down.

I also run it in its own window not coherence

Hope this helps a bit

How much RAM in your mac out of interest?

[eighteentee]

Not sure if this is helpful or not. I've just upgraded to VMware 3.0 which seems quite a way faster than 2.x I know you have investment in Parallels which makes the decision harder. Having said that, Parallels v4.x runs like molasses under Snow Leopard for me. Might be a version thing?

[nileshpa]

Thanks guys for the feedback. Here's the update.

The macbook pro is a week old so I presume its running the latest Mac Os i.e. Snow Leopard. The spec is 15in screen , 2.66Ghz, 320Gb HD and 4GB Ram with Parallels v4 Installed. The Windows VM is XP pro SP2 & I have allocated 2 Gb & one processor. Compared to this, my current config is a Dell Server with 2.67Ghz Core2 Duo with 2GB ram running Windows XP pro SP3. So I expected Mac to be a lot faster.

Initailly when I posted my question, Actinic data wasn't restored from a backup but instead the folder SITE1 was simply copied over. I prefer to take copies of the folder rather than invoking Actinic backup as this is much quicker. Also, Actinic has an undocument feature where it tends to simply crash with a DMP file when it feels like it & this is quite often. My Site has about 10k products & 1500 sections & a backup takes about 40mins, which has now been taken. The restore now fails with wrong version (v2.8) of MDAC where 2.6 is required. Trying to find my old Actinic CD to reinstall v2.6.

Once I overcome this, I will update again.

Regards
N

[NicolaUK]

I've been running Actinic via Parallels for a number of years now, V4 XP SP2 and have no problems at all. I do tend to only use it as a dev machine or if away from the office though. I run it in a window with memory set to automatic

17" MacBook Pro 4GB 2.66Ghz OS 10.5.8 - I haven't had time to put SL on yet!

[nileshpa]

Thanks for the feedback, Nicola.
Seaching the forum for this issue, I've seen posts from yourself where you have successfuly been running Actinic via Parallels on a MacBook for sometime now without any real issues. Although the spec of your MacBook is similar is mine, Actinic on my Mac seems to be really struggling.
Best strategy now is that rather than diagnosing the performance issues, I'm going to go for a clean re-installation of Windows & all the apps. Hopefully that should clear out any anomolies.

[NicolaUK]

Definitely re-install everything - I think I've dodged a bit of a bullet as I ported everything from my old MacBook without reinstalling it and it still works perfectly so guess I got lucky!

[nileshpa]

Update:

I've deleted the Parallels VM & recreated it. Did a clean install of XP, SP2, Sage & Actinic V9.0.5. Reinstalled MDAC V2.6. Restored data using Actinic backup. Resolved all MDAC issues along the way & the net result - Absolute no improvement from before making it totally impractical to use.

The Parallels VM have 1 cpu assigned, 2Gb ram & paging file set in Windows XP to SystemManaged , currently 2GB. Invoking Site Preview show CPU peaking at 45% and process executing Catalog.exe using 380Mb of memory. Current production system is on a Dell desktop Core2Duo 2.66Mhz with 2Gb Ram running Windows XPsp2. MacBookPro is also 2.66Mhz but with 4GB Ram. Hence, would have expected similar performance between the two.

Frustating because I want portability of the MacBook Pro and to move away from being chained to the Dell desktop. Only app that stands in the way is Actinic which is causing so much grief.

Any suggestions to move forward would really be appreciated.

many thanks in Advance.
Nilesh

[Mike Hughes]

I haven't used Macs so can't help on that side of things.

What can slow Actinic down are things like:

1. The page preview tab being open.
2. Having an external image /app on the web pages. These need to blocked from pre-views so that only local stuff is used. Think of things like SSL logos, Google Analytics, Share this (a killer), etc.
3. There were some cacheing problems that can be fixed with a database mod.

The other thing I was wondering about is what browser are you using? I'm just wondering if that plus previews could slow things down enough.

Mike

[nileshpa]

Found the following intructions on parallels Support Forum & executed it.

"leave VM being idle for 30-60 minutes as OS starts to optimize itself after ~30 minutes of being idle. Run the cmd.exe (shell interpreter) & executed:

start /wait Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

Disable Smart Mount via Virtual Machine -> Configure -> Smart Mount."

There is some noticable improvement but not good enough to do any work on. Windows task manager shows catalog.exe using 397Mb of memory with CPU peaking in short bursts to 100% then dropping down dramatically to 2% Possibly averaging about 45-50%.

Mike - Thanks for the ideas. Preview tab has been switched off & I have no external images. I'm not sure about cacheing at the DB level.