Question: I have a VMWare VM I have to use for certain tasks at work. For some reason while the VM is running or suspended something is doing massive (in terms of operations, not Bytes/s) I/O on its .vmem file, making the system on that disk very sluggish.

Resource Monitor basically shows the culprit of the performance problems:

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And the top spot in Disk Activity is always taken by the System process accessing said file.

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Anyone knows what’s going on here?

Answer: According to vmware forums you need to have this setting in your config.ini:mainmem.useNamedFile = “FALSE” to avoid this problem. VMWare would use the real RAM and page file with this setting turned false.

References:

  • http://communities.vmware.com/message/1704684
  • http://vmfaq.com/entry/25/
  • http://faq.sanbarrow.com/index.php?action=artikel&cat=14&id=50&artlang=en