Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I’ve been using VMWare workstation to run some virtual machines lately. Its very helpful to be able to have a WinXP IE6 box, WinXP IE7, Vista, Linux, etc, all at once, not to mention other nice uses of VMWare.

So yesterday I’m doing some big file copies and noticing that my network transfer performance on my gigabit Ethernet is running a solid 6%. Not a blip over or under, as if something were hard-limiting it. I also notice there are these two extra network adapters that VMWare has installed which each think they are 100mbps connections.

So I try disabling them (since with a little poking around I find out they are only necessary if you are doing on-machine NAT or internal networks) and like magic my network transfers hop up to 9.5%. These get installed by default but for most people you will never need them, so get rid of them.

Now to figure out what the next bottleneck is. The machines involved have plenty of CPU, I was testing on multiple disks so disk IO should not have been limiting, and I’m pretty sure everything is hooked up with nice high quality cables on my gigabit switch.

For some reason when I install Windows components on my new workstation there is an app called TrustedInstaller.exe that runs incredibly slow. It takes 30+ minutes of (one core) CPU time per component to install- language packs, the .NET Framework 3.5, etc.

This seems like its an obvious bug and I haven’t seen it on any of my other Vista machines. I wonder if its some interaction with some Penryn feature where Windows is trying to do some wacko-fancy “trusted” thing that doesn’t actually gain anything real.