I am running Ubuntu 14.04 as a VMWare Workstation Virtual Machine inside Windows 8.1. Windows is the host, Ubuntu the guest.
As it stands, my Ubuntu VM keeps stuttering. Music keeps stuttering, but, even worse, typing is horrible. It freezes, I can't type for a few seconds and then my text splashes across the screen. Occasionally I get double letters, aand Ii sstart ttyping like this.
It's all because of this stuttering lag. Please someone tell me how to get rid of it. I just want to type in vim. And play music. I want to type and play music on a £600 laptop.
My laptops specs are as follows:
My VM specs:
As you can see these resources are not even being halfway used while the VM is running inside windows. These screenshots were taking during its stuttering performance:
ubuntu:
windows:
Windows is running smoothly. How do I stop ubuntu stuttering, please. I am running no applications in windows and have pruned my processes, but even so you can see 53% of my RAM is available, 99.999% disk IO is available and 94% of my processor is available...
In Ubuntu, 76% of my memory is free and 74% of my cpu is free. It's a mystery.
Update: I have tested the VM in Workstation 10, Workstation 11 and VMWare Player Pro, and they all stutter. I really don't think it's the vmitself. No soft-lock ups, no errors reported...it's fine apart from the stuttering.
101 Answer
From my own extensive experience virtualizing desktop OS, I can confidently tell you that Ubuntu doesn't virtualize nearly as well as Windows in general OR leaner Linux distros such as Linux Mint Mate.
On my end I generally use Linux Mint Mate as my go-to distro for running under VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation (I use both).
However, if you want to see how far you can get with Ubuntu, here's my advice:
GUEST: Make sure you have installed VMWare Tools in Ubuntu. This can improve performance dramatically.
HOST: Do enable VT-x in your BIOS. But be aware that (ironically) VT-x doesn't improve Guest performance, or reduce host load, all that much.
HOST: Make sure all Host drivers are up-to-date (especially the video driver).
HOST: Configure your antivirus/antimalware software to EXCLUDE the folder in which your Guest files reside (including the hard drive image file).
GUEST: Disable any unnecessary desktop enhancements, animations, and graphical silliness in the Guest (don't forget to try disable Compiz too).
HOST: Install VirtualBox and test your Ubuntu Guest in that. Preferably make a backup of the Guest hard drive image file first. If you find VirtualBox works well, while VMWare doesn't, then at least that confirms your laptop is capable and something is not working right in VMWare.
GUEST: Don't waste your resources on 64-bit Guests. In my experience, 32-bit Guests use less resources and run faster (sometimes significantly so) compared to 64-bit Guests.
