A *particular* app running slowly?

[Peter]

The new WinXP SP3 PC is running fast, except (it turns out after a lot
of tests) basically just one app: the Agent news/email program, which
suffers massive disk activity anytime I do anything which accesses its
database.

AV software (Kaspersky) is disabled, and anyway the Agent database is
excluded.

Agent (Forte) don't know what this could be.

Could Windows somehow managed to set itself to a low process priority
for Agent?

The PC is a 3HGz dual-core P4, 2GHz, 300HB HD (2x SATA mirror raid).

 

[Bob I]

The key phrase here is "massive disk activity". When was the last time
file maintenance was done on the folder structure? Trash emptied and
folders Compacted? It may also be a disk problem where the database file
is residing, so perhaps run chkdsk. You may want to consider defrag if
it's been a while and Agent is a high use application.

 

[Bob I]

It's nothing as simple as this.

This is a newly built PC.

The email program uses a simple single directory database structure,
containing about 100 files.

On any other PC it runs at lightning speed. On this one only, it is as
if it had to apply to windows for some kind of permission to
delete/rewrite (no delays on reading only) each file.

Is there some investigation I could do to narrow this down?

I have Agent running on another XP machine and on that it seems OK.
x----------x

Don't use "Agent" so no idea what settings you could look at inside it.
I was referring to the contents of the database when I said folder
cleanup. Newly built PC, but how did the Agent database get there?

 

[Tim Slattery]

Don't use "Agent" so no idea what settings you could look at inside it.
I was referring to the contents of the database when I said folder
cleanup. Newly built PC, but how did the Agent database get there?

Agent is a newsreader/email client (www.forteinc.com/agent). As OP
says, it creates a number of files in a single directory to store
messages it's retrieved from newsgroups, as well as a master list of
groups, kill file, etc. etc. I've run Agent on XP for a long time now,
with no problems whatever.

OP says that something is slowing down write (not read) access to
these files. I don't know what would do that, either in Agent or in
XP.

 

[Bob I]

Agent is a newsreader/email client (www.forteinc.com/agent). As OP
says, it creates a number of files in a single directory to store
messages it's retrieved from newsgroups, as well as a master list of
groups, kill file, etc. etc. I've run Agent on XP for a long time now,
with no problems whatever.

OP says that something is slowing down write (not read) access to
these files. I don't know what would do that, either in Agent or in
XP.

FWIW Writing would cause the database file to get larger. As to the
thrashing, perhaps PIO mode is being used as opposed to DMA.

 

[Peter]

FWIW Writing would cause the database file to get larger. As to the
thrashing, perhaps PIO mode is being used as opposed to DMA.

The Properties for the SATA controller say that DMA modes are enabled,
and other applications are not showing a slowdown. For example I can
copy over a 600MB file from C: to D: (both on the same SATA-300
7200rpm drive; actually a mirror raid system comprising of 2 physical
300GB drives) in 50 secs, which is completely reasonable.

The 'database' is also not really a database; it is just a load of
files, each one containing the messages for each folder in Agent. And
I am not a big Usenet user so don't have millions of messages. This
data was moved to this PC from a previous Win2000 PC, using simple
copy. Agent itself was of course reinstalled fresh.

I did move the database to another partition but it runs the same way:
very slow write operations.

I will next try creating a tiny FAT32 partition (I think there is an
unused 1GB at the end of the hard drive) and see if that helps.

 

[Bob I]

The Properties for the SATA controller say that DMA modes are enabled,
and other applications are not showing a slowdown. For example I can
copy over a 600MB file from C: to D: (both on the same SATA-300
7200rpm drive; actually a mirror raid system comprising of 2 physical
300GB drives) in 50 secs, which is completely reasonable.

The 'database' is also not really a database; it is just a load of
files, each one containing the messages for each folder in Agent. And
I am not a big Usenet user so don't have millions of messages. This
data was moved to this PC from a previous Win2000 PC, using simple
copy. Agent itself was of course reinstalled fresh.

I did move the database to another partition but it runs the same way:
very slow write operations.

I will next try creating a tiny FAT32 partition (I think there is an
unused 1GB at the end of the hard drive) and see if that helps.

Certainly sounds like the hardware and file system are not the cause of
the issue. Any kind of ongoing virus scan or indexing set to check or
scan the database files?

 

[Peter]

Certainly sounds like the hardware and file system are not the cause of
the issue. Any kind of ongoing virus scan or indexing set to check or
scan the database files?

None I can see. I have disabled AV (Kaspersky) and anyway it is
excluded from checking this directory. Indexing... I have turned off
the windows indexing service for the entire drive c: too.

I am wondering if the Agent application is running with a very low
time slice. Is that possible? I have done tons of embedded programming
and even wrote a real time O/S (on a Z80). Win2000 used to have a
priority setting for each task but a) it never seemed to work and b)
XP doesn't seem to have it (in PerfMon).

 

[Bob I]

None I can see. I have disabled AV (Kaspersky) and anyway it is
excluded from checking this directory. Indexing... I have turned off
the windows indexing service for the entire drive c: too.

I am wondering if the Agent application is running with a very low
time slice. Is that possible? I have done tons of embedded programming
and even wrote a real time O/S (on a Z80). Win2000 used to have a
priority setting for each task but a) it never seemed to work and b)
XP doesn't seem to have it (in PerfMon).

open Task manager, then the processes tab, r-click on the "Agent" entry,
"Set Priority" is there.