Java hang in VMWare Fusion XP VM
Posted by brendo | Posted in work | Posted on 29-03-2009
Tags: fusion, java, netbeans, tech, vmware
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I have recently moved over the the dark side and have a mac now. Part of what has made that change over so smooth has been VMWare Fusion. I have been very very impressed so far with how it all works, even more so once I reduced the RAM available to my XP VM from 1GB down to 512MB. This improved the performance significantly because OSX had enough resources to be able to run smoothly, therefore the VM benefited.
One of the 2 apps that I am currently using in XP is Netbeans. I realise there is a Mac version, but for JVM reasons I need 1.6, which isn’t available on the Mac just yet. I have found what appears to be a bug.
Whenever I leave Netbeans running when I suspend the VM, the next time I start it, the java process has spiked to 100% and netbeans is virtually unresponsive. Even then when I close Netbeans properlly, the java process remains (still at 98%-100% CPU usage) until I manually kill the process.
The simple workaround is to make sure Netbeans is shutdown before suspending the VM, and ensure that the java process has terminated, but this is not always an option (especially if in a hurry).
I will investigate this a bit further, possibly a VMWare Fusion bug, as I never saw this behaviour in VMWare Workstation running the same VM.