1) I installed XP64 with service packs right up to the minute.

2) Yes VMWare Fusion has a max limit of around 8Gigs for any OS 64 bit. However, you can run multiple VMs on one machine...of course you need VSL Licenses for each of those VM's - and I mean VSL Library licenses $$$ =) This is still better than Parallels, which doesnt allow x64 and limits you to around 2gig.

Are you saying you are running VMWare? It wasn't clear...

3) 1 Virtual processor - I tried 2 today and it seemed to distribute the load better. However, If I have problems when I start working, I will revert back to one processor. The other thing to set the general VMWare seting to have VMWare have a higher priority than OSX. So between processor settings in the VM OS, and the general preference setting to let VMWare have a higher priority should be some levers to move to tune it up. You can also disable other devices, but generally they dont seem to need to be touched.

Another thing I did today was have the VE3 in the VM point to Apple RAID drives for the Vienna Libraries through a shared folder. Normally, I believe XP could not read them. However, in the VM XP could read them just fine and stream. This might save a problem when you want to move from OSX to XP on different machines. For example, I can use the same sounds on my MBPro without having to reformat between DOS and Apple.

I played test chord again with full orchestra. In Sibelius it had a bit of a problem starting. However, after 2 false starts it worked just fine. I am thinking the buffers needed to be filled or something.

So, I am sold on this technology - at least for all my needs. I licensed the VE3 and VMWare today. It seems to be working for me and appears to be stable. But I will need to work with it for a few weeks or months to really become intimate with it.

VMware Fusion has a 2.0 beta right now. I wonder what is in there? Also, I'll bet parallels will make an announcement at the developers conference this coming month of June.

If you havent tried this out, you should. Its seems to be a good bridged solution until you come up with a native OSX 64x version - at least for us folks on Mac Pro 8's with loads of memory. I'd like to get some other peoples opinions and have others try it.

PS: One thing: when in Ve3, and loading a matrix...if I open up the folder/tree on the right display, one of the cores goes really high in processing. I'm wondering if something is throttling in your code at that point...may want to have a look. if I go back to Main display, it stops back down to more idle. .

Well I too took the plunge to see if I could get VMware working, although I've only a quad core with 8gb RAM. I created a 5GB VMware XP64bit image and have managed to fill it up, have 32 channels working quite happily on the same machine.

I've been using the Suspend option in Vmware which basically copies the RAM down to a disk image. Problem is of course it takes a few minutes to load the RAM backup again! So I'm not convinced of this approach compared to multiple slaves. With the 3 mini's I can at least load 6gb in parallel! I think therefore the next big challenge is around startup times and also a memory maintaining VE - so when you switch projects you don't need to reload everything again.

Regards

Tim

timkiel:

Thats really cool! I was going to test the freeze feature, but I wasn't sure how it could be reconnected to Sibelius again after closing down the applications, and I got distracted with some other toys.

The basic benefit here for me is that I don't have to shell out additional cash for slave machines + peripherals when I have a perfectly expensive MP 8 sitting here hardly being utilized with passion. Hence, this holdover solution cost me something like $300 or so dollars until we see a VE3 64 come along. And then I'll be able to access more memory space. Yeah, still will load slow, but I'll live with it.

Q: I wonder how putting the computer to sleep would affect VMWare and affect reload performance? Maybe you can try this with your rig?

EDIT: I was able to load about 6 gig of samples spread over 5 instances of VE3 in my VM tonight before the UI on VE3 got to be a bit frozen. It was still operational and usable. Tomorrow, I'll try and load a 6th and see if it also can be used - pushing my luck.

Im impressed its working as such. At least its a solution for energy savings. Wow.

I need to see if there are any XP memory tweaks for 64 bit I can perform on this. I know there are some for 32bit in my Giga days. Perhaps that might help me with the interface problems I am experiencing on a 5th instance. I'll also try loading less samples in that last instance.

Some things you can do - turn off the paging file, turn off background wallpaper and use the smallest size screen that you find usable (e.g. 1024x768). However I have noticed that the CPU spikes to 60% sometimes when redrawing the VE screens, no idea why.... Regards Tim

in my experience especially the giga-tweaks are a bad idea, i noticed they actually might lower available GUI ressources .. but who knows ..

i'd rather encourage the developers to optimize further than to start again working with tweaks which may cause side effects ...

christian

CPU spikes related to redrawing screen can sometimes be fixed by lowering hardware accelleration in your grafic driver ...

christian

Fixed my system cache OFF Im not sure this is correct. Under 32 windows this needed to be 2.5x your memory size regardless of physical memory. So a 2 gig machine needed to allocate a 5-6 gig fixed swap file. Had to do with some pointer allocation or something...

Background desktop off
Smaller screen size
16 bit colour
No graphics acceleration
Turned off System Restore
Visual FX - Optimize for BEST Performance

Questions:

Which should get priority on these settings?

Processor Scheduling - Programs vs Background Services?

Memory Usage - Programs vs. System Cache?

Still having screen issues...
EDIT: Just upped Virtual Memory to around 11gig, and it solved screen problems. Going to play around some more tomorrow evening with it. Any additional tips from above settings woudl be helpful. Thanks.

I'd use Processor Scheduling to Programs (you're not running any ASIO drivers) and Memory Usage to System Cache. I'm surprised that turning up virtual mem to 11gb sovled the issue - I always turn it off. Also I'm using the Beta version 2 of Fusion.

Tim

I wish I could find the exact reason. I remember a bunch of audio tweaks that suggested raising it to 2 - 2.5 times your physical memory. I also remember reading "Inside XP" which talked about the need of XP to have a 1:1 between physical memory and virtual memory, even on large memory machines. The system also utilizes it regardless. Whatever the exact reason, I don't recall, setting this high had some affect.

There were also a couple of registry tweaks that I used to use that "seemed" to do something, but this was with GigaStudio and I don't think important right now - LargeSystemCache and IOPageLockLimit. This is supposed to also help but I didn't try it NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreationDisableLastAccessUpdate.

Turning off services - none really here in VM I could see to turn off..

@composer22 said:

I remember a bunch of audio tweaks that suggested raising it to 2 - 2.5 times your physical memory

i can't agree on this at all ... i'm considering this to be a workaround for heavily underpowered homecomputers ... actually under NT4 i've limited virtual memory to 2MB *) (this was the minimum allowed) to speed up applications. machines beyond 1 or 2 GB should be treated individually, especially since i can't see something even trying to fill 16 GB virtual memory on an 8 GB machine ...

 

the other point: windows (2000, XP, 32bit) takes 50% of available memory equally for kernel space and user space - kernel space on machines with more than 2 GB RAM could be limited to use only 1 GB (not the other way around) - changing the (more or less) well-known registry key values had always to be done very carefully to not limit other ressources and often had different effects on different computers.

 

basically VI / VE is intended to run best with the default registry settings, but this doesn't mean you need to keep designs, uPnP, DHCP, ect running and virtual memory at a useless value.

 

rules for VISTA are slightly different since there is a sheer plethora of services running and a few things have been already optimized by default ... unfortunately not the virtual memory (or can someone tell me what to do with a 32 GB pagefile on a 32 GB machine?)

christian

 

*) i should have added that the NT4 workstation i'm referring to here already had 1 GB RAM ...

For the time being, I'll leave it at the system recommended 11gig and see how it affects performance and stability. It seemed to have done something positive. We can always roll back allocation to something more fine tuned as we work with it.

Unfortunately, VMWare doesn't seem to allow you to resize the VM file, so I cannot test larger sizes. I have a 20gig VM. I looked for a disk manager and tried to follow VMwares instructions on command line changes, but could not make my VM larger.

EDIT: Turning OFF graphics acceleration failed to improve on a large utilization of a single core when viewing the directory tree under Matrix in VE3. Perhaps a thread there is having a party.

Well, last evening some more testing.

The graphic fix regressed, and now I am still getting the same problem.

I tried turning off the paging file and testing, and also with the full 11 G. I also tried a 512M paging file I hardly notice any performance differences in the meters. I "believe" that the 11G version has some performance improvement, but I am not sure it is wishful thinking. I do notice it gets a little bit more RAM but hardly anything significant. I believe this is because the system swaps out a bit of itself.

I've also tried the usual performance improvement adjustments with XP and the System Panel, and services.

My belief now is that XP tuning tricks make little if any difference in helping get more out of XP and VE3, at least with VMWare.