One of these VMs is not like the other

The theme this month is "your Dev box will do weird things, for no explicable reason"...

As I mentioned earlier, I've switched from using XP Pro as my Host OS, to using Ubuntu 7.10 (64 bit edition). As a side-effect of other Dev upgrades, I now have 2 guest OS images running XP Pro: my "old dev environment", and the "new" one.

Both VMs are configured nearly identially:

Old:

• created via the Win XP Host OS version of VMWare, then imported when I upgraded to Ubuntu
• 8 Gig C:
• 50 Gig E: drive
• ColdFusion 8, IIS
• 3 Gigs of RAM, 2 processors
• MS SQL 2000
• Running Cygwin for Unix commandline support

New:

• created via the Ubuntu Host OS version of VMWare (this is the only "real" difference in the VMs)
• 200 Gig C: drive
• ColdFusion 8, Apache
• 3 Gigs of RAM, 2 processors
• MS SQL 2000
• NOT running Cygwin (yet)

...so in theory, the only "extra work" that the New image is doing is the Apache server. However since it's not running IIS, the two should (hopefully) cancel each other out, yes? And they should perform at roughly the same speed, yes?

That's not proving to be the case (for me). OldVM runs just fine. NewVM is *noticably* slower! Upon startup, services take much longer to start (CF in particular). Dreamweaver 8 is also nearly unusable as it's so slow! It's similar to running a guest OS without VMWare Tools installed - everything lags just a little bit longer than it should.

...but the only core differences I see are that one VM was created on an XP host, and that the slower run happens to be running Apache instead of IIS. Otherwise it's the same setup.

I've tried turning on/off Apache and MS SQL. Neither seems to be THE culprit. Updated various libraries on Ubuntu (one of which actually made the problem worse).

Finally it's fixed. The answer...set the NewVM's settings to "one processor" instead of two. Poof! Now it's behaving just fine, everything is usable, and I'm back in action.

How's THAT for a weird fix that makes no sense?! :)