…is something you may consider turning off if you’re unhappy with VMware Fusion’s performance.
As for ArcGIS Desktop, it works noticeable faster in VMware Fusion (aff link) if the entire workspace is moved inside the VMware image instead of accessed via “Shared Folders”. ArcMap feels snappier and geoprocessing runs about 35% faster as my quick benchmark showed. Performance issues caused by “Shared Folders” is mentioned at an ESRI Discussion thread too.
My benchmark test was just a geoprocessing task I needed to do for a project, executed in 3 different workspace environments:
#1 – inside the VMware image
#2 – on an external USB harddisk, mounted in Windows
#3 – on an external USB harddisk, mounted in Mac OS X and accessed through VMware Fusion’s Shared Folders feature
The task was to intersect 2 layers, everything done inside a File Geodatabase:
Layer A: 11,932 features (20,4361 vertices)
Layer B: 3,100 features (arcs from point buffering)
The intersect-process returned a 300MB feature class containing 952,265 features and 5,724,810 vertices. Below is the chart showing the time needed to complete the task for each workspace environment.
ArcGIS geoprocessing task performance in different workspace environments
In figures, option #1 took 8 minutes 57 seconds, option #2 9 minutes 3 seconds and option #3 needed 13 minutes 29 seconds to finish.
Clearly, the performance bottleneck in VMware Fusion is “Shared folders”. No doubt, it’s a handy feature and makes file sharing between host and guest-OS very easy, but for performance reasons you better turn it off.
Once in benchmarking-mood I ran the same task with increased memory and 2 CPUs. Out of curiosity, just to see the effect of more memory and CPU power. My standard setting for VMware Fusion is 1 CPU and 512MB RAM allocated to the guest-OS, which turned out to be the best setting for working at decent speeds in both host and guest-OS so far. The result for the same geoprocessing task with 2 CPUs and 1024MB RAM was 8 minutes 17 seconds. Little faster, but, because of experiencing a sluggish host Mac OS X, not worth it.
Despite performance I ran into another problem with “Shared Folders” and File Geodatabases a while ago. Well, I actually never verified that this problem is related to “Shared Folders”: a File Geodatabase corrupted while executing “compact database” in a “Shared Folder” workspace. According to that thread at ESRI it happened on network drives too. However, I experienced it only in “Shared Folders”, not in other workspace environments. Quite annoying bug though.
CNET has an