Writes to system volume information saturating disk

[Roof Fiddler]

My Vista RTM system is sustaining disk "highest active time" near 100% and
the Image "System" (PID 4) is sustaining about 300MB/min writing to
C:\System Volume
Information\{<32-digit-hex-number}{<another-32-digit-hex-number>} for a very
long time (many minutes). It's gone as high as 440MB/min. The IO priority
for this is "Normal". The disk is thrashing constantly. It's making my
system unusably slow.
None of my open programs are actively doing anything, my memory usage is
only about 680MB out of 1GB total, and there's very little swap file
activity or any other disk activity besides this write to system volume
information.
Why is it doing this? What is it writing to that file?

 

[Richard Urban]

Did you just finish installing a new program, such as Office. There are many
changes that system backup/restore records.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Roof Fiddler]

Did you just finish installing a new program, such as Office.

No. But I have made a lot of changes to some big files.

There are many changes that system backup/restore records.

So these writes to system volume information are the shadow copy service?
Why is the IO priority "Normal" instead of "low"?

 

[Richard Urban]

Could be that you have a program installed that is constantly logging
information. Every time the log file changes it is shadow copied. As to why
it is not done at low priority? Maybe it can't do it that way in order to
keep up with the real time changes.

I had a virus/malware on a customers computer a few years ago that was
rewriting some files a couple of times a second. It was continuous. It
brought the computer to it's knees. If it had been Vista there is no way
that shadow copy could have kept up with the situation (in my opinion).

If you were me, and I realize you are not, you would restore your system
from a known good image that you had created with the likes of TrueImage
HOME Edition 10.0


--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Paul]

Mine does the same and I'm sure this is a design decision. I just installed 50MB update and it then it total probably wrote 500 or 600 MB to this file. How overkill?

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