VMWARE Fusion MacOS Performance problems & HUD incomplete

[paulmorris24]

Hi,

Been running PT4 in a Windows XP virtual machine, but I'm getting pretty bad general performance (i.e. much worse than HEM2). This includes things like responsiveness to switching tabs, loading results, stats, graphs etc.

Also, when playing the HUD seems to progressively degrade performance until it kills the poker room card animations and hogs the virtual machine. Switching off the HUD in PT4 immediately resolves the live performance problem, re-enabling the HUD immediately kills performance again.

I've been playing 888 Network with 3 tables max, for a 90 min session. Definitely feels like performance degrades over time, until the point where the HUD stops updating such that no HUD overlay at all is displayed for players joining the table.

The VMware host is a MacBook Pro 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB DDR3 running OSX 10.6.8 with VMWARE Fusion 3.1.3 running XP SP3 with all updates applied. On this hardware I've had no problem 12 tabling with Party & 888 running HEM2 HUD, HEM2 itself remains responsive but generally slow drawing graphs.

Please let me know if you need any more info.

Kind regards,
Paul

[kraada]

Are you running PostgreSQL in the VM or in the host OS? We've found that you get much better performance with PostgreSQL installed in OS X rather than installed inside the VM.

[paulmorris24]

Thanks. Running Postgres within the Virtual Machine, I'll consider moving it into Mac OS but I was comparing like with like as I prefer to have everything self contained within the VM.

I've since increased the memory available to the WinXP VM from 512MB to 1GB which has made PT much snappier. Perhaps its hogging quite a bit, what are the published min requirements for a standard XP install?

Still experiencing the HUD issues though, with missing player HUDs and progressively worse performance of the VM due to the HUD though now not as bad (or taking longer to slow up), I guess because I've provided more memory for it to eat its way through

Closing & reopening PT4 whilst leaving my poker tables running seems to fix the missing player HUDs. ???

[StevenM]

Paul - I am the most frequent VM user of the PokerTracker staff members, from experience you should generally over-allocate RAM when using a VM, the minimum requirements will result in poor performance for you due to the unique issues of running a VM. In each of the examples below I hosted the PostgreSQL database in OSX , and accessed the SQL server as if it was on a dedicated machine via the HOST's IP and port (this requires some manual configuration of PostgreSQL as discussed here: https://www.pokertracker.com/guides/PT3 ... al-network. As Kraada mentioned we do not advise hosting PostgreSQL in a Virtual Machine due to the processing requirements and the effects on disk speed.

Initial Laptop VM - 4 gigs ram on 2010 Mac Book Pro Core Duo using Parallels. No matter what I did, there was not enough RAM assigned to the VM to get a snappy performance. The entire computer was sluggish, the VM was too great a load on the processor

Second Laptop VM - Same system upgraded to 8 Gigs ram, and assigned 3 Gigs of ram just to the VM and 1/2 GIG to video RAM (an important consideration due to the way the HUD works). I also enabled Faster Virtual Machine (which affects the host OS speed when multitasking), and Better Performance which means I cannot get more than an hour of usage while using the Battery. I disabled all snapshot and auto compression of virtual disks to keep background processes from affecting my performance. The net result is a very usable experience - but I must admit that my Windows VM feels like a machine that is 5-6 years old

Desktop - iMac 3.4Ghz i7 with 16 Gigs ram and 3 cores assigned. Same RAM allotments as the Second Laptop VM. This VM is actually as fast as my i7 Windows desktop machine, it feels natural, no delays at all, I can barely tell that i am using a VM.

My recommendation - RAM for a 2.8ghz Macbook Pro is relatively inexpensive now, you can buy two 4Gig sticks for around $80. Upgrade your ram and host the PostgreSQL server on the OSX partition, use version 9.0.6 because it will take advantage of your 64 bit processor and OS better. Allocate as much RAM as possible to the VM. Additionally consider switching to a Bootcamp partition to avoid the OS X processing running in the background.

As for your comment on HM2, I find that odd... all the tests we have been privy to require a larger memory footprint than you are using. In general most players are reporting much better results in low-processing and limited RAM environments with PT4.

Good luck... I hope my experience guides your way! On the bright side the OS X PT4 Beta should be available by summertime if all goes as planned, its not that far away.

[paulmorris24]

Thanks Stephen. Great info, I'll definitely take a look at migrating Postgres & a ram upgrade. Although I do have a windows 7 bootcamp partition that I use for gaming, I like running Poker stuff in a virtual machine as I can still have my Mac desktop on my other screen. I like the fact the VM can be kept 'clean' and used just for poker providing some security assurance. Also keeps any poker site spyware/security away from my main system(s). Paranoia? I work in the tech industry....

Comments re HM2 not meant as inflammatory. I was also very surprised given all I'd seen & heard online suggested that resource usage & performance of HM2 was significantly worse than HM/PT3/PT4. Given my experiences I assumed there must be a serious bug relating to performance in a VM.

I'm still experiencing HUD issues with missing player overlays as a session proceeds with only 3 or 4 tables open. System performance is not notably slow at this point. Restarting the HUD doesn't resolve it, only closing & restarting PT4 resolves.

[StevenM]

Thanks Stephen. Great info, I'll definitely take a look at migrating Postgres & a ram upgrade. Although I do have a windows 7 bootcamp partition that I use for gaming, I like running Poker stuff in a virtual machine as I can still have my Mac desktop on my other screen. I like the fact the VM can be kept 'clean' and used just for poker providing some security assurance. Also keeps any poker site spyware/security away from my main system(s). Paranoia? I work in the tech industry....

In that case please put your paranoia aside for a brief moment, it would be great if you could compare experiences on the Bootcamp partition for us.

Comments re HM2 not meant as inflammatory.

No worries, I didn't take it that way at all, I was only explaining that our experiences were different - but that also assumes that Postgres is located on the host OS. I should point out that PT4 does not do well in the lowest of RAM issues, we are not immune to this issue, in the end PostgreSQL is the bottleneck. We haven't announced the minimum system requirements yet, technically it could be similar to PT3's requirements but we plan on pushing these up to assure everyone has a better playing experience.

Given my experiences I assumed there must be a serious bug relating to performance in a VM.

PokerTracker relies on PostgreSQL for the cache, HM2 uses a different method it's cache is not affected if the VM hosts the PostgreSQL database. As explained in the prior post hosting PostgreSQL on the VM is not recommended, even on a very powerful machine you will experience some serious speed degradation unless you use Postgres on the host OS. This is also the case if we were running a test Windows VM on a Windows machine.

I'm still experiencing HUD issues with missing player overlays as a session proceeds with only 3 or 4 tables open. System performance is not notably slow at this point. Restarting the HUD doesn't resolve it, only closing & restarting PT4 resolves.

Once you get your VM in working order please post some screent shots, lets see if we can help you. A new beta is expected soon that may address some of your issues already. Good luck!

[G3K0]

from the OP's tenor it would seem likely that he is saving the HH to the VM; however, if not: I found on PokerStars that my PT4 Hud would not update for new players unless I was saving the HH files to the VM - my previous setup of having all histories saved to the Host OS and setting PT4 to read them from there would not recognise new tables/new players at current tables.

As I said, it probably doesn't apply to you...but if it did

[StevenM]

from the OP's tenor it would seem likely that he is saving the HH to the VM; however, if not: I found on PokerStars that my PT4 Hud would not update for new players unless I was saving the HH files to the VM - my previous setup of having all histories saved to the Host OS and setting PT4 to read them from there would not recognise new tables/new players at current tables.

As I said, it probably doesn't apply to you...but if it did

We are investigating this, in theory the location of hand history folder should not matter as long as the folder is mapped to a shared drive - yet for some reason there are some noticeable issues. if we find a solution, we will be sure to address it in an upcoming release, it is a known issue for both PT4 and PT3.

[paulmorris24]

In that case please put your paranoia aside for a brief moment, it would be great if you could compare experiences on the Bootcamp partition for us.

Ok, haven't played enough hands to confirm if the HUD missing issues still occur, but I have a Bootcamped install up and running.

First the good news. Its Fast. Very slick & responsive. Only played 20 hands or so on a single table to check it out but HUD updating fine, hands importing near realtime from 888. Switching between graph, reports & stats has a <2sec response time to draw & populate graphs/reports. Memory usage according to Task manager started around 130mb now remains around the 150mb mark.

Now the bad news. Processor usage is high. Macbook is working hard after the first few minutes fans spin up and quickly the CPU climbs to around 40% util. This seems to continue even after the poker table is closed down, slowly creeping up now to near 50%. Not sure what's going on there. Switching off 'Get Hands whilst playing' the CPU usage drops right away to a background process taking near zero cpu as you'd expect, though memory usage has crept up to 160mb whilst I've been typing this lot.

Bootcamp install is Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Macbook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 2.8 Ghz 4GB DDR3
Windows Experience Index is 5.7 (limited by HD data transfer rate - other metrics range from 5.9 to 6.5)
Running postgres 9.0.6 x64 on localhost (windows 7 bootcamp)

Will stress it harder over the next couple of days.

Also have a working postgres install in Mac OS X now. Bit of a hassle to backup & restore the database from the VMWare guest OS to the OS X host. Couldn't get the backup & restore functions within PT4 to do what I expected. No matter what options I selected or deselected for use default server/port I couldn't get it to restore the backup to the remote postgres db on the host even though I deleted all other postgres connections (leaving just a blank test db on the host) and shutdown postgres on the vmware localhost. Eventually I figured a way to create a similarly named blank DB on the host OS then used pgAdmin to take a backup of the VMware DB and load it up on the host. After much fiddling and a few fatal error crashes, PT4 seems to happy talking to the OSX host's postgres server. Ended up using a similar technique to get the DB loaded up in the bootcamped windows 7 install.

Haven't played any hands on the VMWare WinXP setup since, but browsing through the stats & results tabs things do feel a little quicker.

Let me know if you'd like more detail on any of the above. I'll post further updates in the coming days.

[StevenM]

Paul -

You have noticed the downside to running a VM with Postgres working on the native host - the backup and restore functionality will not work because PokerTracker 4 does not have access to the Postgres tools on the VM platform. Instead you can use pgadmin to accomplish this goal, if you need help there are some great guides available under the PT3 heading (we are converting guides for PT4 as I type).

We have the same Macbook, similar settings except I have 8 gigs or ram. As the Macbook got older, I noted the fan kicking in harder than ever before, I assume you also have the same experience. PokerTracker 4 uses the GPU to render the HUD when it is available, go to HUD - Edit HUD Options - General Settings and disable Allow Translucency and Allow Vector Scaling to reduce some of the GPU load. I recommend performing some tests by opening all the tables and monitoring memory & ram usage before and after enabling PT4's Get Hands While Playing. I find the load is not significant on my laptop until I start opening 10-12 tables, thats when I will start to see a very slight performance hit. On my desktop I can run 16 tables without any issues except a slight delay in HUD performance (which is to be expected due to Postgres processing).

PS: you wont have ram issues with PokerTracker 4, PostgreSQL will use far more ram than PT4 needs. 160Megs is about the peak, think of PT4 as a input, filtering and display system for Postgres, most of the hard work is done in the database itself.