Performance in Parallels

This post is going to a work-in-progress-post... The goal is to find what settings in Parallels that gives the best development experience using Visual Studio 2013.

The host is a MacBook Pro Retina with 16GB of ram.

My current settings for my Windows 8.1 virtual machine as of January 26th:

• 8GB of memory
• 4 CPU Cores
• Enabled nested virtualization (for WP development)
• 512 MB of video memory
• DirectX 10 3D acceleration
• Enabled Retina resolution

My environment is responsive but it's not good. The fan is constantly running and Parallels hogs about 300% of the CPU when I have Visual Studio and an WP Emulator running in Windows doing nothing but sitting idle.

As soon as I find my cable again, I'm going to turn off Nested Virtualization to see if that's the issue. Also I tried uninstalling Google Chrome that some posts recommend, but I'm unsure if that did any difference at all.

Please comment with your best tips for performance.