A problem with using more than 50% of the memory under Vista SP2

[Robert Miles]

I've been seeing problems with significant slowdowns on
both of my Vista Home Premium SP2 machines lately
whenever the amount of physical memory used, as reported
by Windows Task Manager, gets much over 50% of the
total present. I first saw this problem on my 64-bit machine
with 8 GB, and therefore guessed that the problem was
due to the 4 GB limit for a program running in 32-bit mode.
However, I'm now seeing the same problem on my 32-bit
machine with 2 GB, so I'd now guess something else.

The Back Up Files program is now running on my 32-bit
machine, with about 75 hard faults per second. Is that
program using hard faults as part of its way of reading the
files to back up, or does it have a problem with using
memory efficiently?

Neither my 32-bit machine nor my 64-bit machine has
completed a backup successfully lately, regardless of
whether it was a full backup or an incremental backup -
something about a problem with the Windows Catalog
Files.

I notice that the autorun.wbcat file included in the top
level of the last few backup sets has length zero bytes;
is this normal?

 

[Robert Miles]

I've been seeing problems with significant slowdowns on
both of my Vista Home Premium SP2 machines lately
whenever the amount of physical memory used, as reported
by Windows Task Manager, gets much over 50% of the
total present. I first saw this problem on my 64-bit machine
with 8 GB, and therefore guessed that the problem was
due to the 4 GB limit for a program running in 32-bit mode.
However, I'm now seeing the same problem on my 32-bit
machine with 2 GB, so I'd now guess something else.

The Back Up Files program is now running on my 32-bit
machine, with about 75 hard faults per second. Is that
program using hard faults as part of its way of reading the
files to back up, or does it have a problem with using
memory efficiently?

Neither my 32-bit machine nor my 64-bit machine has
completed a backup successfully lately, regardless of
whether it was a full backup or an incremental backup -
something about a problem with the Windows Catalog
Files.

I notice that the autorun.wbcat file included in the top
level of the last few backup sets has length zero bytes;
is this normal?

Sorry - that message went out before it was completed.
At lower levels in the last few backup sets, there, are
many *.wbcat files long ehough to contain something -
about one for each *.zip file.

I've seen a number of faults in Microsoft Windows Search
Filter Host lately on my 64-bit machine, with the times
suggesting that they occured during the last backup run,
but accidentally erased all of those error report files before
sending them to Microsoft. The searches may also be in
Windows Mail, where I've been doing a lot of searches
lately in order to clean up my quite sizable collections of
unread news messages after discovering that having many
more than 50000 such messages in the same folder or
subfolder is likely to both halt Windows Mail, and make
it difficult to move the whole collection of messages
over to Windows Live Mail without errors.

Windows Task Manager does not seem to fully report
where the physical memory is used. It's currently reporting
about 400 MB assigned to various processes on my 32-bit
machine, but with a total of about 63% of the 2 GB on that
machine as in use.

The programs could be having problems with the rather
large total number of files on each machine - around
2,000,000 on the 64-bit machine, and 2,500,000 on the
32-bit machine; most of these files are probably *.nws
messages of 20 KB or less, but I've found no way to collect
so many messages into larger collections using fewer files
and still leave the messages readable in Windows Mail.

I've seen similar results in previous backups on my 64-bit
machine - a significant slowdown when more than 4 GB
of the 8 GB total physical memory is in use.

Any idea how to get a more complete report on what the
physical memory is being used for?

Also, any idea how to get Back Up Files to do a full
backup, except without including information about any
previous backups in its Windows Catalog Files?

I noticed that these problems started about the time the
Update for Microsoft Search Enhancement Pack was
installed on each machine, along with a few other updates.
Any idea if this update has caused Vista SP2 to start
reserving blocks of memory without keeping any record
of what programs these blocks are assigned to, so that
they can be freed when those programs finish running?

Although reboots free the excess memory usage, I don't
know any way to reboot in the middle of a backup, and
then still complete that backup successfully.

A number of other programs also slow down considerably
when more than 50% of the physical memory is in use,
including the avast! antivirus program and Windows
Defender antispyware program on the 32-bit machine,
and the Norton Internet Security 2009 antivirus program
on the 64-bit machine.

Robert Miles

 

[Robert Miles]

Sorry - that message went out before it was completed.
At lower levels in the last few backup sets, there, are
many *.wbcat files long ehough to contain something -
about one for each *.zip file.

I've seen a number of faults in Microsoft Windows Search
Filter Host lately on my 64-bit machine, with the times
suggesting that they occured during the last backup run,
but accidentally erased all of those error report files before
sending them to Microsoft. The searches may also be in
Windows Mail, where I've been doing a lot of searches
lately in order to clean up my quite sizable collections of
unread news messages after discovering that having many
more than 50000 such messages in the same folder or
subfolder is likely to both halt Windows Mail, and make
it difficult to move the whole collection of messages
over to Windows Live Mail without errors.

Windows Task Manager does not seem to fully report
where the physical memory is used. It's currently reporting
about 400 MB assigned to various processes on my 32-bit
machine, but with a total of about 63% of the 2 GB on that
machine as in use.

The programs could be having problems with the rather
large total number of files on each machine - around
2,000,000 on the 64-bit machine, and 2,500,000 on the
32-bit machine; most of these files are probably *.nws
messages of 20 KB or less, but I've found no way to collect
so many messages into larger collections using fewer files
and still leave the messages readable in Windows Mail.

I've seen similar results in previous backups on my 64-bit
machine - a significant slowdown when more than 4 GB
of the 8 GB total physical memory is in use.

Any idea how to get a more complete report on what the
physical memory is being used for?

Also, any idea how to get Back Up Files to do a full
backup, except without including information about any
previous backups in its Windows Catalog Files?

I noticed that these problems started about the time the
Update for Microsoft Search Enhancement Pack was
installed on each machine, along with a few other updates.
Any idea if this update has caused Vista SP2 to start
reserving blocks of memory without keeping any record
of what programs these blocks are assigned to, so that
they can be freed when those programs finish running?

Although reboots free the excess memory usage, I don't
know any way to reboot in the middle of a backup, and
then still complete that backup successfully.

A number of other programs also slow down considerably
when more than 50% of the physical memory is in use,
including the avast! antivirus program and Windows
Defender antispyware program on the 32-bit machine,
and the Norton Internet Security 2009 antivirus program
on the 64-bit machine.

Robert Miles

A little more: On my 64-bit Vista machine, I used the icon
menu in the lower left corner to start a search for scannow,
with Windows Task Manager already running on the screen.
I used the Search Everywhere option.

The result did NOT find a program by that name, only a
few newsgroups messages mentioning it, before the search
ended with an error message saying I needed to run scannow
on something related to my Windows Mail database. I saw
considerable rises and falls in my physical memory usage
(perhaps 2 GB to 4 GB) while I did this.

Repeating that now doesn't repeat the problem - perhaps
a slower part of the search system has caught up and saved
the results.

Robert Miles

 

[SC Tom]

A little more: On my 64-bit Vista machine, I used the icon
menu in the lower left corner to start a search for scannow,
with Windows Task Manager already running on the screen.
I used the Search Everywhere option.

The result did NOT find a program by that name, only a
few newsgroups messages mentioning it, before the search
ended with an error message saying I needed to run scannow
on something related to my Windows Mail database. I saw
considerable rises and falls in my physical memory usage
(perhaps 2 GB to 4 GB) while I did this.

Repeating that now doesn't repeat the problem - perhaps
a slower part of the search system has caught up and saved
the results.

Robert Miles

The program file you are referring to is sfc.exe, System File Checker.
scannow is the switch to be used, as in "sfc /scannow" without the quotes.
If the search is Windows Desktop Search 4.0, you can uninstall it and use
something else for a search engine. I like to use Agent Ransack in Vista,
and turn the Windows Search service off.

SC Tom