I'm using a 64bit Windows 8 inside vmplayer, with 2 virtual processor cores, virtual hard disk resides on a fast local disc and is not preallocated; host CPU is Intel i7 3770, should be capable of hardware virtualisation but I don't know if VMWare uses it; NAT networking; Sound card connected, USB connected, accelerated 3D graphics (NVidia 313.30 on host)

My problem is, that the VM often pauses for a few seconds, and then speeds up for a few seconds to reach real time again. Time in the VM actually moves faster after the pause, for example all animations using timers speed up.

When running, the vmware-vmx process shows ~150% CPU usage in top, but 0% when pausing (and D state i.e. waiting for IO). iotop shows normal disk writes from vmware-vmx threads, but during pauses, the flush kernel thread uses 99%.

Are there some options to try so that VMWare doesn't wait for IO? I've tried a few things available from the GUI but the issue never went away…