Fixing VMWare pain in the ass performance

A tech-ish post for a change. Just for the Googles of the world.

If you are running more than one VM on the same host, and performance is hell, you need to:

$ mkdir ~/.vmware
$ echo "sched.mem.pshare.enable = FALSE" >>~/.vmware/config

and launch VMWare. This makes VMWare stop constantly comparing memory blocks in hopes of finding common ones so that it can fake more memory on the page level. It will start using real RAM. Massive improvement, in my experience. You will obviously need more RAM.

Other good settings are:

MemTrimRate = 0
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"