Performance Degrade

G

Guest

Hello,

I've noticed on my WinXP Pro machine that the performance will degrade at
random times. It usually happens when I impatiently "login" to XP just after
the login screen displays. If I wait a few minutes and then login, the
performance of XP is "normal".

I did notice that when this degrade happens, the lsass.exe process is
continuously recording IO reads and writes. The Network performance display
shows a "hearbeat" in the activity (both send/recv) with nominal network
usage.

As a side effect, with IE7 beta, the browser responds very poorly to input
events. For instance, when I click on a dropdown box, IE pauses for about a
half-second before the window appears. A similar pause occurs when I focus
on an input control and begin typing.

This is a developer machine with SQL 2000 Developer, SQL 2005 Developer,
Office 2003 Pro, IE7 Beta, VS.NET 2003, VS.NET 2005, Norton System Works
2005, Norton Ghost, PGP, and Windows Defender.

Hardware: 3.0 Ghz P4, 2GB RAM, multiple high speed, high capacity drives,
Intel 900 series motherboard (Pro).

Even as I type this message, lsass.exe is registering about 3 IO reads per
second and 3 IO writes per second with 7.3MB memory usage. I ran a system
scan to see of lsass.exe was trojaned, but did not see it installed anywhere
but in the windows directory.

I tried windowsupdate and did not see any pending updates. During the
performance degrade, the CPU utilization is nominal (less than 10%).

I do weekly full system virus scans, and daily Windows Defender deep scans.
I also have the Windows Firewall installed. A netstat -n does not show any
unexpected destination IP addresses - in fact, nearly all connections are
back on localhost except for the expected web connections (on my development
projects).

Why is lsass.exe constantly doing IO?? Any ideas??
 
P

PopS

Sounds like you have a mountain of things probably loading during
boot.
If you have a lot of things loading at startup in the background,
processes, tasks, etc., you're probably running into those;
that's why waiting a minute or so seems to make things "OK", if
this is the case, and it would be my first guess.

Try tossing Taskmanager or a cpu monitor into the startup and
watch what it's doing at that point; at least it'll verify -when-
the activity stops and is available for everything else. Once
you're sure of -when- it's there or not, then you can do a little
more tsing.
There are many boot-time monitors around too if you want to
google for them.
I actually added a short message to my Registry to display a
reminder to "wait a few secs or the machine will feel sluggish"
because of it. It comes up just before the desktop gets painted.
Only problem with that is, you ahve to click OK to continue - I
cant' find a way to make it a temporary thing that only displays
for a couple seconds so I may remove it soon.

You sound like you know what you're doing, but if you want any
further details, just ask.

HTH,
Pop


HTH,
Pop


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