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Since installing 2010 last week, I have been struggling with a huge performance drop with my iMac. Refresh screen seems to take twice as long as it used to, selecting and using tools is much slower to respond, changing views, connecting dimensions to objects, etc, etc - everything seems to be affexted - I would guess by 30-40% overall from what I was getting out of 2009. Are any other iMac users experiencing similar problems? I have an iMac 24", 2.16Ghz, Core duo, 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SdRAM, with about 10GB free space. Running latest Parallels 4.0. Would be interested to hear from anyone in a similar situation.
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Hi Aspect I have 2010 setup on my macbook pro and 24inch imac under parallels. Both ran very well under parallels and i did not see any performance hit from 2009. I have recently upgraded each machine to 4GB with memory from crucial UK at very low cost so this may of helped. I have also now got bootcamp setup on each machine as i mailed revitkid.com who i know uses a mac and he said the best performance would be in bootcamp compared to any VM setup, parallels or fusion. I have to admit it appears very stable and fast within bootcamp and although can be a pain to boot in and out of platforms i think it may be worth it for the additional performance. Please note that although i have upgraded to 4GB i think XP can only recognise 3GB but all in all im very happy. If i just want to look quickly at somthing i will probably just use my parallels setup but if going to be working for a long time on a project or doing renders i will use bootcamp. Hope this helps
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I have also seen a proformance hit in 2010 on my MacBook Pro (2.5 gh - 4gig ram - VMWare Fusion). I had been using 2009 sucessfullly on my mac as a virtual machine, but with 2010 I have needed to move over to BootCamp to run acceptably. There are two issues for me with 2010. One - proformance seems much slower with 2010 in the virtual machine. I am not sure how much of this is also that I am at a point in the project (CDs) where the complexity of the file is getting rather large. It is around 40 MB at this point. This is my first Revit project. so I don't know how that compares to the "typical " file. Two - I have not been able to get Revit to see the licencing server for our network license. When I go to the settings and tell Revit the name of the licensing server, it seems to accept it, but I am still not able to open a project accept in Demo mode. In BootCamp I am able to access the license server.Working in BootCamp is OK in terms of performance, but even then I find that the fans are going quite a bit and I wonder I really just need to bite the bullet and get a big Windows tower with tons of ram. It may be that a laptop, even a pretty fast one like my brand new MacBook Pro, is really not an appropriate tool. I would be curious to now what others are finding. Most of the productivity apps we use, like email, calender, project management, are web based and so platform independent, but I miss all of the refinement of the mac UI, and the ability to use other aps without rebooting, like PhtotoShop, that I have on the mac side.
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armour35 - of your new 4GB ram, how much have you allocated for Parallels to use, or have you set that to 'automatic'? Also how much RAM did you have prior to the upgrade? I also have bootcamp, but would definitely prefer to try and optimise 2010 under Parallels so I can keep working within the Mac environment.
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RAC2010 uses DirectX acceleration now which OSX/Parallels etc don't support so I'd imagine that wouldn't help.
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aspect i had 2 gig of ram whilst working on RAC 2009 and it ran like a dream under parrallels but i could only ever seem to set the memory at 512mb which i thought was low but did not know how to change this or it would not let me. I have just fired up my macbook pro which has 4 gig of ram and under paralles and its still saying main memory 512mb so dont know how to change this....... any ideas
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Hi Mr Spot Paralles introduced direct x at version 4 so should run ok
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Well there you go, my information was out of date. Thanks.
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hey armour35 - there only seems to be 1 way to set your RAM memory allocation for Parallels. When you first fire up your Parallels machine you should get a menu of 'Parallels Desktop' (in bold) 'File' 'View' 'Window' and 'Help'. Under Parallels Desktop > Preferences - you can set memory allocation to automatic or manual. I've tried both options (in manual setting it to maximum available), but to be honest it seems to work better leaving this set to Automatic... There is also an option in the 'Configure' menu (under ' Virtual Machine) once you have started up Windows inside Parallels. However I cant seem to get access to these options to change them - could be tied up with the main preferences settings mentioned above. I guess when in doubt read some help files/blogs and/or send an email to Parallels support - this is what I should do myself I think! Let me know if you have any breakthroughs. Edited on: Mon, May 18, 2009 at 11:57:23 AM
Edited on: Mon, May 18, 2009 at 11:57:46 AM
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So an update: After sending a message to Parallels support about this issue - they responded by giving the following instructions: 1) Open Parallels Desktop. Do not start the Windows Operating System. 2) On the initial Parallels Desktop menu bar (you will have 'File' 'View' 'Window' 'Help') - click Parallels Desktop > Preferences > Memory. 3) Manually change the Memory to 600 MB > Click OK. 4) Now start the virtual machine. On the Virtual Machine Menu bar click on (you will have 'File' 'View' 'Virtual Machine' 'Window' 'Help') - Click Configure > Memory. **To do this, windows OS must be shut down, but the virtual machine must still be running. Depending on your computer setup, you may need to follow these steps to allow you to change the memory settings: A. Start the window OS and then go to the Configure option. B. Select the Start up and Shut down option C. Change the option on Window close - select Ask me what to do. This allows Windows to be shut down, but not the virtual machine. 5) Manually Change the Memory to 1250 Mb (or in some cases 1236MB) > Click OK 6) In the Configure window > Click on CPU > Manually change the number of CPUs to 1. 7) In the Configure window > Click on Smart Mount > disable the Smart Mount option. Restart the Mac.
If the issue still persist then follow the below mentioned steps. 1. Log in to windows > Click on Start menu > Go to Run > Type %temp% > Press Enter key > Delete all the files that are in this temp folder. I followed these instructions and have noticed an improvement for sure - maybe not as fast as running under Bootcamp, or as fast as 2009 used to be, but nevertheless, alot better than before. Anyone who tries these settings, please post your results so we can see if Parallels needs to do more work on this issue. Edited on: Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:51:12 AM
Edited on: Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:48:46 PM
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Well an update to this thread. Since my first post after installing Revit 2010, I have been persisting with trying to get it to work smoothly through Parallels on the iMac. Sad to say, but after much effort, numerous Revit crashes (at least 3 per day), I have finally thrown in the towel and gone back to running it through Bootcamp. Definitely a performance improvement no matter what the tech people at Parallels will tell you. Also less crashes - down to about 1 per week. I would still love to be able to run it through Parallels, so if anyone has any insights or tips on getting this to happen, please post your info on this thread. Thanks,
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I haven't run RAC 2010 yet on my iMac using Parallels but I do run it in WinXP Pro using Bootcamp and I've no complaints except that RAC 2010 is much slower than 2009. I ran 2010 next to a PC that was almost twice the machine and it ran just as slow on PC. (I imagine if I were to more than 2GB of ram, 2010 may have run faster on my iMac) Anyways, I found this article on the AUGI forums and thought it might help. I do plan on running RAC 2010 on my iMac with Parallels 5 eventually because of the fluency between Windows and Mac so I'll be following the same advice given in the post. Let me know if this help you and I'll do likewise once I get up and running with Parallels. http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=110905
Edited on: Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 6:29:34 PM
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You're probably going to think I am crazy for even attempting this, but I ran Revit Structure 2010 thru parallels on my Macbook (not pro). The machine is maxed out with Ram at 2GB. I started up using my custom template file and began drawing walls the other day (first time using it on this machine) Granted the file size was really small (can't remember exactly the size) but it ran great considering this isn't the fastest machine - in fact I have had this machine almost a couple years now... Some settings I changed was within Windows XP. Go to Start>Control Panel>System>Advanced>Performance>Settings - Choose Advanced Tab, UnderVirtual Memory click Change. Make sure min and max are set equal...my system would only let me set it to 4096. But I would set this as high as it will let you. The other thing I noticed when I first moved to 2010 was the placement of the quick access toolbar (which has been talked about in another thread and the credit goes to that thread) If this is placed above the ribbon, everyhting is okay - but when it was placed below the ribbon I was getting 3 crashes a day, and this was on a native windows machine. Hope this helps!
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