VMware Fusion impact on Battery Life?

Question

VMware Fusion impact on Battery Life?

I just got a 15" i5 MBP, and am running VMware Fusion 3.0 - battery life is truly terrible (2.5 hrs after disconnecting the magsafe connector), and I notice in Activity Monitor that a process VMware-vmx is using "CPU 162%" and overall the System CPU usage is 42% (per main panel) - with everything idle except me typing this note.

Anybody else noticing this kind of behavior? I've seen all the posts about Flash, not not anything specific about VMware - is it possible VMware is forcing the GPU, even if idle or in a background window?

Mac OS X (10.6.3), MBP 15i5HRes

Posted on May 3, 2010 8:57 AM

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Answer 1

May 3, 2010 9:00 AM in response to TaylorwithMBP2010

battery life is truly terrible

Of course it is...you're running an entire 2nd operating system inside your main OS. This is not unexpected.

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Answer 2

May 3, 2010 9:17 AM in response to TaylorwithMBP2010

Further to this, when stopping Fusion, the CPU usage drops off to around 2.5% as expected, and battery life goes from 1.2 hrs to 6 hours - I'm still surprised that Fusion idling (no user activity in the virtual OS, Fusion window in background) is using this much CPU and (consequently) battery. Basically it makes Fusion a strictly "on power" app - only MBP (2006 version) was not that bad.

Also, anybody experiencing this with Parallels? if not, I will probably switch.

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Answer 3

varjak paw

Level 10

182,668 points

May 3, 2010 10:36 AM in response to TaylorwithMBP2010

You may have some background process running in Windows on your system that's eating up processor and battery life even though Windows appears to be idle. You might want to bring up the Windows task manager and see if it shows anything taking up CPU time. If not, you might want to take up the issue in VMWare's forums and ask for advice.

FWIW, Windows XP on my VMWare Fusion system takes up about 5% at "idle" with active network connections and a shared folder. Your MBP may show a higher percentage of CPU usage then does my four-core iMac, but it shouldn't be a lot higher.

Regards.

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Answer 4

lhotka

Level 1

97 points

May 3, 2010 11:12 AM in response to TaylorwithMBP2010

Both Fusion and Parallels trigger the nVidia graphic chip, which ***** battery power.

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Answer 5

OhioUser

Level 1

0 points

May 6, 2010 9:55 AM in response to lhotka

Does anyone know if Parallels is going to resolve this bug.

They should NOT be forcing NVIDIA graphics on and its killing our battery.

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Answer 6

lhotka

Level 1

97 points

May 6, 2010 4:41 PM in response to OhioUser

It's not a bug in Parallels or VMWare's code. Any application that includes certain frameworks (like OpenGL), triggers the change. That's Apples poor architecture, and the vendors have no control over it.

Since both applications support accelerated graphics, they use that code, and therefore trigger the change.

This is a broad issue, resulting in much much worse battery life in the real world than on the mid-2009 machines.

For the record, the ** in my post above is not profanity. Evidently the censors don't like that word, which is also used to describe the movement of liquid up a straw into your mouth. It rhymes with a profane word, but that's not the one I used!

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