VMs slow and unresponsive despite using vGPU/3D acceleration

zenowl77

Member
Feb 22, 2024
88
12
8
VMs are fairly slow and laggy, windows especially, changing the wait to end non responding applications from 1s to 5s in windows 10 mostly fixed it but that is just tweaking parameters to mitigate the issue so the system handles the problem better, not actually fixing the root cause of the problem.

it slows way down and windows flash and go non responding then flash like they are recovering but instantly become non responsive again, sometimes in a rapid look like they are flickering, this leave the VM almost entirely unresponsive for how ever long it decides to continue, on windows ten anywhere from 30 sec to 30 min, windows 11 though seems to be MUCH worse, i left my usual vm open all night as it runs other applications like ollama but a window was frozen and flickering as usual figured it would stop in a minute so whatever, its been glitching out for over 12 hours apparently, vm still mostly frozen.

cpu usage is low, disk i/o is basically non existent, everything is low, its not actually consuming resources or maxed out in any way, something just isn't right.

has anyone ran into this before and found a fix of some kind?

VMs are using Nvidia vGPU and its worse in the VMs without it, i have a LSI sas card on the way for the HDDs, hoping this at least slightly helps general performance as drive lag is extremely noticeable and spikes to multiple seconds instead of ms.



Code:
hardware:
CPU: i7-7820X
RAM: 96GB DDR4
mobo: Gigabyte X299 UD4
NVME: WD Blue SN550 1TB
SSD: WD Blue SA510 1TB
HDD: 2x HGST Ultrastar He10 (huh721010ale604) 10TB 7200rpm 1x 12TB version 2x 8TB one HGST one wd red
GPU (1): GTX 1060 3GB
GPU (2): intel Arc A310 4GB
GPU (3): Tesla P4 8GB
 
just setup the LSI card, ended up with a LSI 9211 8i card, no cache or battery on this one, pretty sure it is considered a fake raid controller basically just a IO controller card with non of the extras but i got it for $10 so cant complain.

right away i am seeing a different in latency performance and in tests it has shaved off about 5-30% latency time on most tests and some tests are up 45% for throughput but others are down and it seems to be topping out around 160/165mb/s the disk is capable of 250mb/s so theres a bit of a win lose but overall it has made a huge difference and the wins are more than the loses by far.

i am also seeing better performance under load, onboard controller handling all the disks would lose performance more than the LSI card, i would see latency on tests as high as 110ms and the LSI card under load seems to hit highs of 58-63, so even under load it is responding almost twice as fast.

in task manager i am seeing response time peaks of around 180ms during load but so far that is much better than the previous 2000ms the onboard controller was hitting.

does anyone here know how i can use lsiutil to tune everything or a better way to configure it to squeeze out that little bit of extra performance?