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Your video card, wifi card, USB, and other peripherals can contribute to the slowdown. Other hardware can also slow down your virtual machine if they’re subpar. This can save space on your hard drive, but it creates a lot of fragmentation-which in turn slows down reading and writing from the disk and the virtual machine. If you use dynamic disk space, the space used by the VM only grows as you use it. This setting requires that you have that space available at the time you create the VM. It’s best to set virtual machines up with fixed disk space instead of dynamic disk space. You will need to have adequate free disk space available to allocate to your VM. Writing and reading from the disk is much slower than from memory it’s sure to slow down your VM and the host. That means it will use space on your hard drive to store things it would normally keep in memory.
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VMs are memory hogs if you don’t have enough free, your computer will begin memory swapping. Memory is a huge factor and often a major cause of a slow virtual machine. The faster, the better: if you have multiple CPUs or a multi-core processor, that will make things even better. Virtual machines need a lot of processing power. If your system is lacking in any of what I like to call the “Big 3” resources-CPU, memory, and disk space-then this is likely the source of your problem. Remember that each virtual machine shares resources with the host, so you need to ensure you’re packing some power.
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In most cases, the issue boils down to the host system not having the power to run VMs. If your VM is running poorly, the first thing you want to look at is the host system-the computer you’re running it on. However, those issues typically come down to four main categories. They can be sensitive to a variety of things that cause them to slow down. Virtual machine applications are very process-intensive programs.
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