Mint 18.1 slower than 17.1?

[geophile]

I am running Mint 18.1 (Cinnamon) on VMWare Fusion 8.5.8, running on an MBP (2.5GHz i7, 16 GB, MacOS 10.12.5). The VM is configured with 1 CPU and 6 GB.

This setup seems very sluggish compared to a Mint 17.1 VM I was using previously. The only variable here is the Mint version -- the VM settings and iOS version are the same as before.

Graphics performance, in particular, seems very slow. Browsers and big applications (e.g. Intellij) sometimes take 1-2 minutes to start. Often there is a very long time lag (30-60 sec) before anything appears on screen at all. I turned off Effects (under Preferences/System Settings), and this helped a little, maybe. Things are sometimes faster, but subjectively, things are just much more sluggish than before.

I'm not even positive this is a Mint question, although as noted above, the only variable here is the Mint version. Any ideas what might be going on? Or some direction to investigate?

[Cosmo.]

Using VirtualBox I see the same: Mint 18 (even worse) and Mint 18.1 run much slower compared with any 17.x variant. Wait a short time, with Mint 18.2 (currently at beta state, final release is in preparation) the speed is back where it should be.