VMWARE Fusion MacOS Performance problems & HUD incomplete

[paulmorris24]

Ok, I've played through around 1400 hands since making the changes - time for an update.
Over 1000 hands in XP under VMware, the remainder in Win7 Bootcamp.

Moving postgres out into the host OS has immediately fixed PT4 responsiveness issues. Beforehand the PT4 screen would lock up or not redraw and become generally unresponsive most all of the time. That is now resolved and performance is very acceptable, near to the bootcamped Win7. The HUD updating problems and missing hud overlays for certain players has also been resolved, so I assume this bug only occurs when PT4 & postgres starts to thrash and run slow.

However there are still major resource issue problems, regarding CPU. The same behaviour can be observed under VMWare and bootcamp.

It doesn't seem to matter how many tables are being played, I've replicated this repeatedly with just 1 table though I've played up to a maximum of 6 tables.
With the HUD running & PT4 set to get hands whilst playing nominal CPU resource is taken initially. Typically the poker client itself will use more CPU than PT4.
After a seemingly random period of time, anything between 10mins and 90mins PT4 will begin to consume large amounts of CPU - eventually stealing 80%+ and dragging the system down. This has repeatedly occurred with just a single table open under both VMware XP and Win 7 Bootcamp. Editing the HUD options has no impact on this behaviour.

I've tried to determine if anything triggers PT4 to begin misbehaving. The only thing I can think of, and its probably coincidental, but it feels as if more often than not the problem will occur after I've popped PT4 into the foreground whilst playing at the tables to either review & replay a hand that's just passed or to refresh my results for today to see how I'm doing. Sometimes, it seems to occur regardless.

The problem definitely seems like a resource bug rather than general HUD performance as stopping & restarting PT4 whilst leaving all the poker tables open drops CPU back down to nominal, and if PT4 is immediately restarted & set to Get Hands whilst playing normal service resumes with CPU remaining nominal until the next time PT4 goes awry and gets CPU hungry.

Hope this is useful. Any news on the next beta, not necessarily the release date as I understand that may be flexible but at the very least it would be good to understand known issues which have had fixes applied are believed to have been resolved in the next beta.

[kraada]

That apparently random resource hogging is our automated housekeeping running behind the scenes for you. We are planning to remove that functionality because we have shown that, though there are benefits, the detriment that you are experiencing outweighs those benefits. I don't know yet if it will be removed for the next beta release, but I hope so.

[paulmorris24]

Great news, thanks!

[paulmorris24]

Well, the resource problems haven't gone away.

If anything I'd say this is more widespread in this current beta. PT4 just grabs 100% CPU after running for a little while. Restarting PT resolves the problem, but it's happened more than 5-6 times today.

If it makes any sense, the slowdown is more severe than the previous beta and more sudden in its onset. I had 5 tables open and in a matter of seconds PT caused all my tables to lockup & timeout. Close PT4 everything snaps back into shape, restart and all is good again (for a while).

Let me know if you need me to try anything else, or capture logs etc.

[WhiteRider]

Please do let us have your PokerTracker4.log file from C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\PokerTracker 4\ (which you can access from the PT4 File menu) next time you see this - if you could leave it for at least a few minutes before you send the log that would help as it would let us see if something completes after a while, as long as it isn't stopping you playing of course.
Thanks.

[paulmorris24]

Hi, I left it running for an hour or so last night until it calmed down and copied the logs aside just in case.

Just let me know the best way to transfer the logs to you.

Paul

[kraada]

Send them via our support system.

[mjr161]

I just wanted to add that I've always run PT3 and now will use PT4 in a VM, although I use Parallels Desktop 7 which by all comparisons online has overall better performance than Fusion... especially in Coherence / Unity which is what I use. I started off as a Fusion user, but the redraw issues with the Unity feature drove me nothing short of insane. To be fair if you're playing in windowed or full screen mode I don't think there is a big difference between the two products.

I've always run Postgres in the VM (Win XP), as like the OP I tend to like to isolate all my poker clients from my main OS (Mac Lion) as poker clients are a light version of spyware. I'm also from a technical background pre poker, so I've done quite a bit of performance testing and this is what I've found to work the best.

Just my 2c...

[StevenM]

I've always run Postgres in the VM (Win XP), as like the OP I tend to like to isolate all my poker clients from my main OS (Mac Lion) as poker clients are a light version of spyware. I'm also from a technical background pre poker, so I've done quite a bit of performance testing and this is what I've found to work the best.

I recommend you try installing postgres on the OS X host, preferably 9.0.7. I think you will find much better performance than what you are used to while hosting Postgres on the VM. The VM's hard drive is just a great big file, Postgres requires heavy access of the hard drive, that is one of the many reasons why a native hosted SQL server is better than a VM hosted SQL server.

PS: I use Parallels 7 as well, it is the most efficient VM solution I have ever tested, U have tried VMWare, Virtualbox, VirtualPC, and many others... the integration and speed of Parallels is the best I have encountered for a powerful processor and tons of ram.

[mjr161]

I've always run Postgres in the VM (Win XP), as like the OP I tend to like to isolate all my poker clients from my main OS (Mac Lion) as poker clients are a light version of spyware. I'm also from a technical background pre poker, so I've done quite a bit of performance testing and this is what I've found to work the best.

I recommend you try installing postgres on the OS X host, preferably 9.0.7. I think you will find much better performance than what you are used to while hosting Postgres on the VM. The VM's hard drive is just a great big file, Postgres requires heavy access of the hard drive, that is one of the many reasons why a native hosted SQL server is better than a VM hosted SQL server.

PS: I use Parallels 7 as well, it is the most efficient VM solution I have ever tested, U have tried VMWare, Virtualbox, VirtualPC, and many others... the integration and speed of Parallels is the best I have encountered for a powerful processor and tons of ram.

Ok I will try that thanks. Will I just point the pt4 server to the internal IP of the mac side in the server field instead of localhost? I have noticed that PT4 is much slower in pulling up results than PT3 was, especially in large queries (my db has 1.4Mil hands from 47 aliases and nearly 9 years of data!)