Applications sluggish after inactivity

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a Win XP Pro installation on which I experience sluggish application
performance whenever the system has been idle for a while (e.g. after 30
minutes). Several different types of activities are affected: outlook,
office, custom Java application, ...

When bringing an application to the foreground, the system starts swapping.
After bringing each aplication to the foreground, switching between
applications is very responsive.

The CPU is a 2.8GHz AMD Sempron with 512 MB RAM. However, the problem
persists even if not all RAM is in use.

The system has been defragmented, virus scanned and the problem persists
even if 'on access scan' is disabled.

Any help, suggestions or pointers to more information will be greatly
appreciated.

Regards,
Tom

 

[Ted Zieglar]

Spyware?

 

[Guest]

Dear Ted,

Good point! However, I forgot to mention that I run AdAware as well as
Spybot Search & Destroy regularly (starting from a clean install of the
system on). All that I found thus far are 'tracking cookies'. I do not see
any suspicious network activity at my firewall (SW & HW) either.

I was thinking along the lines of suboptimal memory management settings.
However, I can't find any information on preventing 'sleeping' applications
from being swapped out of memory, which is what I _think_ happens.

Thanks for the tip anyway. I'll check for spyware once again just to be sure.

Regards,
Tom

 

[Mak]

How do you change between background and foreground applications?
Tip: when you hit 'minimize' button - you force application to page out
(term 'swapping' doesn't belong to NT), however, if you use ALT+TAB,
Winkey+D or use 'show desktop' there is no 'ill effect' of paging out for
the application, providing Windows doesn't need RAM for something else ATM.

"not all RAM is in use" - how did you arive at that conclusion?

What processes are active when background applications 'sleep'? Use
ProcessExplorer from sysinternals web site to monitor processes activity.
What settings do you have in 'Power Options' control panel?
Did you do *any* tweaks to your system? If so, please list them.
How much of pocesses private virtual address space is stored in paging file?
(In perfmon: paging file, %usage.) How big is your paging file?