Vista's obsession with LARGE FILES is killing its performance and me

[Milhouse Van Houten]

Whether it's indexing, Superfetch, shadow copying, or something else causing
what I describe below, is there a way to dial back Vista Ultimate without
outright disabling the indexing and Superfetch services or whatever else is
causing this? Even on a system with 2GB RAM and a fast disk, this is
unacceptable.

I've been reading a lot of threads here but haven't hit upon the answer of
how to stop this problem without cutting off Vista at the knees:

According to my disk activity light and Reliability and Performance Monitor,
Vista frequently is all over things that it shouldn't be interested in, such
as the 180MB Nero installer I downloaded the other day, or an 8GB VM, both
sitting idly on another partition, which is NOT included in the very
restricted indexing scope.

So I don't *think* it's indexing that's doing it.

Yet, Reliability and Performance Monitor shows "svchost.exe
(LocalServiceNetworkRestricted)" reading such files -- I can even see how
many MB/s.

I'm not using ReadyBoost, so it's not that, and I've disabled defrag
scheduling, so it's not that (also, Defender's scheduled scan is off).

The two example files mentioned above *are* two files that I accessed
recently, so I suppose it could be Superfetch attempting to do something
with them, though it should know better. An 8GB file?! If I download a
350MB AVI file, I would imagine that will be "read" sooner or later as well.

Maybe something to do with shadow copies?

Note: this is not a new installation, so it's not the increased activity
that you see in the week after a new install. It's business as usual, very
often most noticeable after booting into Vista but certainly not limited to
that time.

Thanks

 

[Lord Takyon]

Whether it's indexing, Superfetch, shadow copying, or something else
causing what I describe below, is there a way to dial back Vista Ultimate
without outright disabling the indexing and Superfetch services or
whatever else is causing this? Even on a system with 2GB RAM and a fast
disk, this is unacceptable.

I've been reading a lot of threads here but haven't hit upon the answer of
how to stop this problem without cutting off Vista at the knees:

According to my disk activity light and Reliability and Performance
Monitor, Vista frequently is all over things that it shouldn't be
interested in, such as the 180MB Nero installer I downloaded the other
day, or an 8GB VM, both sitting idly on another partition, which is NOT
included in the very restricted indexing scope.

So I don't *think* it's indexing that's doing it.

Yet, Reliability and Performance Monitor shows "svchost.exe
(LocalServiceNetworkRestricted)" reading such files -- I can even see how
many MB/s.

I'm not using ReadyBoost, so it's not that, and I've disabled defrag
scheduling, so it's not that (also, Defender's scheduled scan is off).

The two example files mentioned above *are* two files that I accessed
recently, so I suppose it could be Superfetch attempting to do something
with them, though it should know better. An 8GB file?! If I download a
350MB AVI file, I would imagine that will be "read" sooner or later as
well.

Maybe something to do with shadow copies?

Note: this is not a new installation, so it's not the increased activity
that you see in the week after a new install. It's business as usual, very
often most noticeable after booting into Vista but certainly not limited
to that time.

Thanks

Indexing has always given me performance drops, whether XP or Vista and
regardless of hardware. I always disable it.

As for shadow copies and restore, Google vssadmin and you can change that
too.

 

[Adam Albright]

Whether it's indexing, Superfetch, shadow copying, or something else causing
what I describe below, is there a way to dial back Vista Ultimate without
outright disabling the indexing and Superfetch services or whatever else is
causing this? Even on a system with 2GB RAM and a fast disk, this is
unacceptable.

While I've seen other people report similar issues I haven't seen them
myself... not at all, which has me confused as to why I don't. Since I
move a lot of files around and they're big video files and I do it
every day, all day long, you would think Vista would be busy indexing
and superfetchimg and whatever else like crazy. It isn't, don't and
hasn't. Not for me which seems odd, not that I'm complaining that it
don't. I only have 1 GB of RAM too. Curious.

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

While I've seen other people report similar issues I haven't seen them
myself... not at all, which has me confused as to why I don't. Since I
move a lot of files around and they're big video files and I do it
every day, all day long, you would think Vista would be busy indexing
and superfetchimg and whatever else like crazy. It isn't, don't and
hasn't. Not for me which seems odd, not that I'm complaining that it
don't. I only have 1 GB of RAM too. Curious.

That doesn't sound right at all. Are you sure your disk light isn't
disconnected or broken (and you're in an environment where you can't hear
disk activity)?

Keep the Reliability and Performance Monitor open and focused in the Disk
section. From time to time you should be seeing a whole lot of file reading
going on, more than what's accounted for by what you're doing at the moment.

 

[Adam Albright]

That doesn't sound right at all. Are you sure your disk light isn't
disconnected or broken (and you're in an environment where you can't hear
disk activity)?

Keep the Reliability and Performance Monitor open and focused in the Disk
section. From time to time you should be seeing a whole lot of file reading
going on, more than what's accounted for by what you're doing at the moment.

Well I just spent five minutes staring at the disk useage monitor and
all I see if every so often some very brief accesses to the paging
file or some other system file with a peak on the graph that maybe
goes up to 25-35% of the scale and lasts for a second or so.
Otherwise, nothing much happening in the way of disk access.

Just for fun, I fired up Vegas, my video editor, and as you would
expect it loading a large video file spiked disk activity, including
more activity on the paging file. This lasted about 15 seconds, then
returned to next to no activity. I next tried rendering a file, which
is an intensive task, this spiked CPU usage, Disk Useage and Memory
useage, again as you would expect with additonal spikes for the page
file and realated DLLs used by Vegas. I never really watched it this
long before. It seems that disk activty settles down to show repeated
spikes at about 60% of the disk graph, then every 30 seconds or so the
hard drive spikes go to about 90% then fade back down again. If the
system is just more or less loafing along doing nothing I don't seem
much disk activity at all, hardly registers on the graph.

Now here's the funny part... Just watching some more for about another
15 minutes if I don't blink my eyes I see things get read from the
hard drives that I'm not running and make little sense. Example, I
just saw Office 97 get accessed followed by minesweeper.exe then the
indexer followed by my DivX player, NONE that I started. Why Windows
is accessing these and other stuff beats me. The spikes last a second
or two at most then the window clears and only two or three system
processes show under disk activity with hardly a blip on the graph.
Beats me why I don't have more disk activity while others do.

Otherwise nope, don't see much disk activity looking at the hard
drive's disk lights on the PC non do I hear the drive, and I am in a
quite room. Just checked how quite to give you an idea using my Radio
Shack audio level meter I'm reading about 32Db.

 

[Frank Saunders, MS-MVP OE/WM]

That doesn't sound right at all. Are you sure your disk light isn't
disconnected or broken (and you're in an environment where you can't hear
disk activity)?

Keep the Reliability and Performance Monitor open and focused in the Disk
section. From time to time you should be seeing a whole lot of file
reading going on, more than what's accounted for by what you're doing at
the moment.

I don't give a darn about the disk light or a performance meter. My 1 GB
Vista machine is plenty fast enough for me. The machine is almost always
waiting for me rather than the other way around.

 

[Ben Enfield]

To those interested,

The fact that you only have 1 gb of ram is key. Since vista has normally
filled the entire quantity of ram, it doesn't have much room to add
additional files. The other people have 2 gb of ram and they are
experiencing Vista's affinity for Superfetch caching. Unfortunately this
includes both the disk reading and the compression of the files (look at
task manager's memory usage; it will become obvious that cached files are
compressed). The following are my conclusions:
Computers with more ram will see more caching than computers with less
ram.
Immediately upon exiting a large program Vista will fill up the ram hole
created, effectively slowing the computer.
Laptops with slower hard drives and large Readyboost drives can take
upwards of 10 minutes to cache files.
Periodically Readyboost will discard its cache and repopulate it with a
more highly compressed and smaller amount of data
This is really annoying
This is odd, as my computer will often only be caching ~800 MB on
the 4 GB Readyboost drive
Anyone else have a set of conclusions?

Ben

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

Your observation about having less memory shielding him from seeing this
wouldn't have occurred to me, but it sounds right. I had concluded that this
was indeed Superfetch behind the problem, because I could keep Reliability
Monitor open and actually watch it (the unnamed service) follow me around
the system. I access a file; it reads the same file a short while later.

I don't have a problem per se with Vista's new philosophy of filling up RAM,
but I do have a problem with Superfetch being supremely stupid at times, as
exemplified by it reading an 8GB VM file (to what end I have no idea, since
no one's system has that kind of memory). Surely I'm missing something here,
as the people who designed this are probably brilliant, but it needs to be a
lot more intelligent than it's shown so far, or it will go on the short list
of things I disable.

I'm particularly puzzled why it becomes as hyperactive as a kitten just
after booting. Why then, when the user is apt to be the most busy on a
system launching apps? Why not wait until later?

To be clear, are you saying that Readyboost is essentially more of the same?
If so, I'm suddenly not so interested in it.

 

[Ben Enfield]

I believe the problem is that MS has not made sure that it is the LAST
priority for the system. Currently it will take resources from other
processes (mainly HD throughput). I also notice that the boot hyperactivity
does not occur when I run my computer on "power save," so Vista does know
how to only cache files that are already being accessed. Oddly, in certain
circumstances Vista is actually quicker in "power save" than "high
performance" for the very reason that superfetch is gobbling up the HDD
accesses and resultant CPU time in the compression of the files.

I have had a lot of luck in minimizing the negative effects by reducing the
frequency at which I turn my computer off. Vista's improved sleep has
become my new best friend.

Ben