Wednesday, October 7, 2015

VMware workstation 11 on Ubuntu 15.04 high cpu utilization solved

VMware 11 workstation on Ubuntu with windows guests freezes from time to time with very high cpu utilization. The process vmware-vmx and khugepaged get 100% cpu time for a couple of seconds. The khugepaged is the process that configures the transparent hugepages. When i disable the transparent hugepages windows guest run without freezes again. To disable it on every operating system start up i put in /etc/rc.local

if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled; then

   echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

fi

if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag; then

   echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag

fi

7 comments:

  1. Thanks sooooo much - I couldn't believe I was the only one having this trouble..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks guy!! Solved my problem after two weeks of attemps|

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey all, thank you so much for the solution. This has been driving me crazy since March last year. I tried everything from cleaning out my fans (thinking it was a heating problem) to upgrading my Kernel, to even purchasing VMware Workstation 12. Non of which solved the issue.

    Is there anyone who can offer a clear description of how this solves the problem, what it actually does. Also, is there not a command that is consistent across reboots as opposed to running this in a startup script....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The long explaination is here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt

      Basically the kernel tries to defrag the huge RAM memory page that the VM requested.

      Delete

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