Hi everybody,

I am running a Windows 11 VM on Unraid and I am pretty unhappy with the performance. First some screenshots to make myself a bit clearer and below the screenshot the specs and settings.

This is how it looks a while after rebooting without anything running except drivers and tools (Mouse, Keyboard, Headset - I also want to use this VM for gaming):

This is how it looks, if I move the mouse around on the screen a lot (drawing fast circles, if you like):

And here are the processes running and creating this amount of memory and processor consumption:

About specs and setup:

The machine runs on a Ryzen 5 8600G with 64GB of DDR5 RAM. The virtual machines are on a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD mirror (the cache device(s)), Windows got 6 (v)cores, the other 6 are for the Linux VM. Btw, the Linux VM, running on EndeavourOS and 24GB of RAM runs totally smooth, complete contrast to the Windows VM.

I handed in a Nvidia 1080 graphics card into the Windows VM, also one of the USB controllers of the host. As mentioned, I also want to use it a bit for gaming but I also want to use it physically (display, keyboard, mouse, USB ports for sticks...) when sitting at my desk next to the host machine. I also handed in a SATA SSD drive (Datenträger 0 in the screenshots) for the games, but the performance issues were there also before I did this.

First I was using i440fx, which is the default when creating a Windows 11 VM on Unraid. I changed this to Q35 today, but nothing changed when it comes to the performance issues. It is more or like the same. All old hardware is deleted from the Windows Device Manager, I also reinstalled the Virtio Drivers from the ISO file.

When starting a bigger programm like a game it takes very very long. Also, when updating games (Steam wanted to update around 30GB today as not used longer) I noticed that the disk drive takes 100% in Windows Task Manager.

I followed some tuning guides here in the forum (e.g. about energy management, hibernation, turning off indexing/Bitlocker (Bitlocker was off anyway), network device (changing virtio-net to virtio)...). The basic problems did not change. So what is wrong here? I cannot think of more which I can tune.

So any input, ideas, anything, is very appreciated!

Thanks,

Martin

Hi,

the situation got much better.

I noticed that the setting

<cpu mode='host-passthrough' check='none' migratable='off'>

from this guide was on again. I disabled it again.

I also disabled CPU pinning, so all VMs have all CPU (v)cores now and I let Unraid handle everything.

Somewhere in the guide linked above I also noticed that the Fuse filesystem could be a performance thing, too, so I changed the vdisk path from /mnt/user/domains/windows11 to /mnt/cache/domains/windows11.

CPU percentage in Idle is now 3-5% and the VM is much more responsive. I was also able to successfully test Fortnite - one of the worst games when it comes to optimization.

Regards,

Martin

Edited July 2, 20251 yr by Roi