Disk thrashes even with tons of RAM. Why?

[Jesse]

My system is often completely disk-bound, waiting and waiting while the disk
thrashes. This happens mostly when switching back and forth between apps,
but not always.

Sounds like excessive paging due to a RAM shortage, right? I do run a lot of
piggy apps on this machine (e.g., MS Visual Studio), but the Task Manager
shows plenty of available memory:

Physical Memory (K)
------------------------------
Total: 1,571,696
Available: 491,720
System Cache: 656,336

Maybe it's malware? ZoneAlarm says no.

Could it be the CPU? CPU usage averages about 5%, and though it spikes
regularly as I use the machine, it doesn't seem to correlate to the disk
thrashing, which goes on even when CPU load is low.

Seems like with almost half a gig of free RAM, I shouldn't be paging at all.
What else can I try to get off the disk?

Thanks!

--

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

My system is often completely disk-bound, waiting and waiting while
the disk thrashes. This happens mostly when switching back and forth
between apps, but not always.

Sounds like excessive paging due to a RAM shortage, right?

No, I doubt it.

I do run a
lot of piggy apps on this machine (e.g., MS Visual Studio), but the
Task Manager shows plenty of available memory:

Physical Memory (K)
------------------------------
Total: 1,571,696
Available: 491,720
System Cache: 656,336

Maybe it's malware? ZoneAlarm says no.

Malware is what I would suspect. ZoneAlarm is a firewall, not an
anti-malware program. I recommend reading Malke's page here:
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware

 

[Touch Base]

| My system is often completely disk-bound, waiting and waiting while the disk
| thrashes. This happens mostly when switching back and forth between apps,
| but not always.
|
| Sounds like excessive paging due to a RAM shortage, right? I do run a lot of
| piggy apps on this machine (e.g., MS Visual Studio), but the Task Manager
| shows plenty of available memory:
|
<snip>

====================================================================

What is your pagefile usage?

When this problems shows open task manager again and have a look at your pagefile usage under the 'performance' tab. If it is showing a unusually high PF usage (and I have seen it peak on 1GB on a customers rig) then I would definitely have a look at this website and make some changes to your settings per their instructions. High PF usage can cause the CPU to run pretty high and slow down the computer like molasses.

Virtual Memory in Windows XP
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Also

Try turning off Indexing, turning Off Indexing Speeds Up Windows

Windows XP keeps a record of all files on the hard disk to try and improve searching speed. The only downside to all of this is that your PC will have to be indexing all of the files, so if you don't use search very much you can disable this feature: Indexing is also only supposed to happen when your computer is idle but unfortunately it gets confused on what constitutes idle. For instance you could be typing a letter or looking through pics or playing a game and suddenly indexing will start.

Open my computer
Right click on one of your hard drive icons and then select properties.
At the bottom of the window you should see "Allow indexing service to index this disk for faster searches," uncheck this and click then click on ok.
A new window will pop up and select apply to all folders and subfolders. Once complete, it takes a few more minutes to make sure that indexing is now switch off.