Excessive Paging

[Ray Manning]

I'm running an XP SP2 machine that has experienced an incredible
decrease in performance over the past couple months and I'm trying to
determine why. At first I thought the hard drive might be at fault
since I was seening It would appear to me that the machine is
needlessly paging based on the PerfMon.exe Pages/sec counter and the
taskman performance numbers. Can someone verify I'm on the right track
and possibly offer solutions?

Here's what I'm seeing:

Perfmon.exe (Pages/Sec) averages of 30-60 with a scale of 1

TaskMan: Performance

Physical Memory (K)

Total : 392,496
Available: 170,000
System Cache 240,000


Commit Charge(K)

Total 158,568
Limit 550,000
Peak 170,000

CPU usage averages about 5-20% but of course spikes at times.


What I don't understand, and perhaps it's my interpretation of the
perfmon counter, is why I have such a high page/sec rate when my peak
commit charge isn't even half of the physical memory. Shouldn't my
commit charge be much higher before paging starts hitting 40+
pages/sec? Is page size 4k? 160k/second when I have a couple hundred
megs of physical memory available?

I did not look at these numbers before I started having performance
problems (long boot times, 5 minutes to log on, etc) so perhaps these
are not out of line, but if not, can someone explain to me what I'm
missing in my interpretation?

Thanks,
Ray

 

[Earl Grey]

Hi Ray:

Without knowing what's running on the machine, all those statistics are
just so many numbers.

Here's what matters: What applications are running and how much
resources are they using?

There's no mystery behind slow performance on a machine without hardware
problems. It's simply an imbalance of running applications vs. resources
available to run them (principally memory). The solution is equally
simple: Add resources or remove applications that use too much of them.

Earl Grey

 

[Ray]

Thanks Earl, I understand that. Are you saying that 30-50 pages/sec
is normal with 392M memory, 160M of available memory and a max
commit charge of 170M? Perhaps I'm I'm not taking into consideration
the cache/available memory relationship and expecting too much from
memory utilization and this is just normal? Perhaps I've just crossed
over the commit level far enough to start thrashing and a memory
upgrade would be in order?

I've been through HiJackThis and SpyBot which didn't turn up
turning up anything interesting and am running AdAware at
the moment (and for many moments to come ;-p Boot times on
this machine have gone from an (albeit slow) couple of minutes
(from power on, through logon to the desktop) to about 10 minutes.
So, either something new is running on this system or something
is failing.

If there is a problem with what is running, it must be loading
at boot time. I've been trying to go through the running process
list to determine if there is something there that isn't right but
it takes time to track each process down.

I've also been through the services list and haven't found anything
out of the ordinary there either although I haven't checked each
one individually yet (hijack this should have caught anything
interesting here).

One other thing that I've noticed that I can't seem to reconcile
is why some system devices, in particular, SystemDevices->
DirectMemoryAccessController are indicating that there is no
device driver installed, the device enabled and yet the driver
tab shows a driver driver info. I ran sfc against the system but
that just quietly exited when done - does it show something
if it made changes?

Thanks,
Ray

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Ray

How much RAM memory do you have? Right click on your My computer icon
on your Desktop and select Properties to get the information.

How large is your C drive and how much free space? In Windows Explorer
rigt click on your C drive and select Properties to get this
information.

--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Ray]

I had thought that TaskMan->Performance->Physical Memory->Total was the
RAM? Anyway, MyComputer reports 384.

The hard drive is 10G with about 1.5 free.

This system was running fine a couple of months ago so I don't think it
requires a hardware upgrade unless
an automatic update pushed it over the edge. It does run McAfee
antivirus which self updates
regularly and automatically updates xp as well. I've tried disabling
McAfee which doesn't seem
to have an effect.


- Ray

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Ray

Your pagefile setting is too low.
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I had thought that TaskMan->Performance->Physical Memory->Total was
the RAM? Anyway, MyComputer reports 384.

The hard drive is 10G with about 1.5 free.

This system was running fine a couple of months ago so I don't think
it requires a hardware upgrade unless

I don't think so either. And I don't think your problem has anything to do
with paging.

These days when you see a sudden worsening in performance, the most likely
suspect by far is malware infestation. I know you said you ran HiJackThis
and SpyBot Search and Destroy, but nevertheless I recommend that you go to
Malke's Malware Removal site at
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware and follow
the instructions there.

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Ray

Your hard drive is very small. Your free disk space is minimal. The
suggestions, which follow may help.

It is likely that an allocation of 12% has been made to System Restore
on your C partition which is over generous. I would reduce it to 700
mb. Right click your My Computer icon on the Desktop and select System
Restore. Place the cursor on your C drive select Settings but this
time find the slider and drag it to the left until it reads 700 mb and
exit. When you get to the Settings screen click on Apply and OK and
exit.

If your hard drive is formatted as NTFS another potential gain arises
with your operating system on your C drive. In the Windows Directory
of your C partition you will have some Uninstall folders in your
Windows folder typically: $NtServicePackUninstall$ and
$NtUninstallKB282010$ etc.
These files may be compressed or not compressed. If compressed the
text of the folder name appears in blue characters. If not compressed
you can compress them. Right click on each folder and select
Properties, General, Advanced and check the box before Compress
contents to save Disk Space. On the General Tab you can see the amount
gained by deducting the size on disk from the size. Folder
compression is only an option on a NTFS formatted drive / partition.

Another default setting on a large drive which could be wasteful is
that for temporary internet files especially if you do not store
offline copies on disk. The default allocation is 3% of drive.
Depending on your attitude to offline copies you could reduce this to
1% or 2%. In Internet Explorer select Tools, Internet Options,
General, Temporary Internet Files, Settings to make the change. At the
same time look at the number of days history is held.

The default allocation for the Recycle Bin is 10 % of drive. On your
drive 5% should be sufficient. In Windows Explorer place the cursor on
your
Recycle Bin, right click and select Properties, Global and move the
slider from 10% to 5%.

--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Ray]

Thanks Gerry, This helped but didn't solve the problem. When I let Xp
manage the file,
it started snagging file space and seems to have topped out at about
760M. I haven't
noticed an increase in peformance yet however, but I'm sure it's a step
in the right
direction

Thanks!
Ray

 

[Ray]

Thanks again Gerry. I routinely reduce IE's cache but forgot about the
recycle bin, and didn't know about the restore allocation. I'll have to
keep those in mind. I run NTFS so all the uninstall files appear to be
automatically compressed. (Un)fortunately what I gained here went right
into the pagefile but it's better than reducing my free space. I think
a defrag might be in order as well...

- Ray

 

[Earl Grey]

Ray:

"Are you saying that 30-50 pages/sec is normal with 392M memory, 160M of
available memory and a max commit charge of 170M?"

You didn't really understand my post, did you?

I apologize if I wasn't clear.

Earl Grey

 

[Ray]

Malware is my current focus and I do have a pretty good grip on malware
but
haven't found anything out of the ordinary yet.

I didn't get a indication if the DMA driver being enabled but stating
there isn't
a driver loaded is anything I should be concerned about. Thoughts on
that one?


Thanks,
Ray

 

[Ray]

I guess not. I thought that those numbers might have some meaning
on the paging behavior, but after thinking about it, they probably
don't
really. I just thought the paging numbers were high and couldn't
understand
why there was that much paging when the committed memory didn't
exceed the physical memory.

- Ray

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Ray

You need to reduce the size allocations as I suggested. You cannot
rely on regular housekeeping with such a small hard drive.

You may find it helpful to know exactly how much of your pagefile is
being used.

Use page file monitor to observe what is the peak usage. Start it to
run immediately after start-up and look at the log at the end of the
session.The log is Pagefilelog.txt. If you right click on the file in
Windows Explorer and select Send to, Desktop (Create Shortcut). The
same applies to XP_PageFileMon.exe.

A small utility to monitor pagefile usage:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

What are your anti-virus and anti-spyware arrangements in term of
programmes being used? Also what firewall?

How many users log on to your computer? Is it only you?


--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Ron Martell]

I'm running an XP SP2 machine that has experienced an incredible
decrease in performance over the past couple months and I'm trying to
determine why. At first I thought the hard drive might be at fault
since I was seening It would appear to me that the machine is
needlessly paging based on the PerfMon.exe Pages/sec counter and the
taskman performance numbers. Can someone verify I'm on the right track
and possibly offer solutions?

384 mb of RAM may not be enough to keep Windows XP from paging
frequently if you are running large, memory intensive applications
and/or are working with very large data files.

Download MVP Bill James' page file monitor utility from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm and run it to
report on how much active memory content has been relocated from RAM
to the paging file. If that utility reports more than about 50 mb of
actual content in the paging file on a regular basis then that is a
pretty good indication that your computer's performance would benefit
from having additional RAM installed.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca
Syberfix Remote Computer Repair

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."