VMware Workstation 9 slow to start

[rolypoly]

I've recently upgraded from VMware Workstation 8 to Workstation 9. Once VMs are powered on and running, they run exactly as expected. However, it takes a LOOOONG time to start VMware Workstation and again it takes a LOOOONG time to start a VM.

These long startup times weren't present with Workstation 8.

By a long time I talking upwards of 1 min. Previously it would take a few seconds.

Anyone else seeing this? Got any suggestions what might be causing it?

For info, I'm running AMD64 with kernel 3.7.6-gentoo-sources on an HP Elitebook 8560p i7 CPU with 8GB RAM.

[avx]

What does CPU and disk load say?

For me,
- /etc/init.d/vmware start -> ~3s
- `vmware` -> ~10s
- booting Win7 x64 -> ~20s

I'm not really noticing a difference to 8.x. (i7-920, 12GB, some old Samsung 7200rpm disk on 3.7.3)
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[kimmie]

This happened to me for a while even with workstation 8. It was working fine, then suddenly startup took 60-90s. Then the problem went away, I can only assume because of an update, as this machine's config is very stable. Sorry I know that's no help to you, but it's probably worth trying a different kernel version (I'm using 3.4). Or maybe rebuilding all packages on which vmware-workstation directly depends.

[rolypoly]

Avx,

Startup time for launching VMware Workstation is 50 seconds, consistently.
Starting the VMware services (/etc/init.d/vmware start) takes about 3 seconds.
Starting a virtual machine takes 40 seconds before even the VMware 'bios' screen is displayed. Then everything returns to normal, performance wise.

When starting VMware Workstation, watching 'top' the system is mostly idle and only in the last few seconds before the GUI displays that the 'vmware' process actually appears in the process list.

I've been through a number of different kernel versions, all 3.x I think, and have also tried different desktop environments too. At least it's consistent!

revdep-rebuild doesn't say anything needs rebuilding but I could try rebuilding all the dependancies.

I'm not going to spend too much time on this as once the VM is running, performance isn't an issue.

Fingers crossed that over time an update somewhere will speed things up again. Nothing else on this laptop feels slow.

Thanks,
Roland.

[avx]

Does this also happen on just created VMs? Maybe you've got some corruption in one of your $machine.{nvram,vmx,vmxf}? Anything in the vmware*.log files in your VMs dir?
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[rolypoly]

It happens on all VMs, new and old.
The log file is quite large. I've had a quick look through and nothing stands out but I'll have a more detailed look later today. It might take me a while...