I've been using virtual machines for quit a while but recently I needed to squeeze more juice out of what it can do when it comes to multiple sessions, more precisely, multiple gaming sessions running in parallel.
If you're using VMware, you can add the following lines to the .vmx file to help to improve some performances:
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = "TRUE"
MemTrimRate=0
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"
- The VMware tools won't function but it may stop the software detecting the fact that it is running in a VM
- By disabling MemTrimRate, memory allocation inside the guest is faster because it doesn't take and give memory to the host os upon all requests.
- By disabling memory sharing (sched.mem.pshare.enable) your guests will not share common memory blocks. Your VMware product will also stop comparing memory blocks.
- When allocating memory you VMware will store parts of the memory in a file. This file will be equally large as the memory allocated to the guest VM. This file exists because the ram allocation method used is mmap. By changing the setting for mainMem.useNamedFile, it will move this file from the VM's default location to /tmp on linux or into the swap file on windows. This will help a bit, especially if this is on a different disk than the VM. In linux it will help if you use the tmpfs file system for /tmp (or ramfs if you can afford it) (details here)
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