XP Suddenly Running Slowly?

[(PeteCresswell)]

I'd guess my PC is running at about 1/3 or 1/4th it's usual speed while
transcoding and ripping DVD files.

Just started a few hours ago.

- System drive has plenty space: 21 out of 49 gigs free.

- CPU temp per SpeedFan was running at 52-53C (ripping some DVDs
and doing some other transcoding at the same time), now that
the transcoding has stopped they're all between 35 and 45C.

- GPU temp about the same: 52-53C

- Can't find any warnings re/hard drives, but all I know to do
is check HD Sentinel's reports.


Intel Core2 Quad.

Only thing I can recall doing recently is changing SageTV to use DirectX
- and that was several days ago.

Suggestions?

 

[(PeteCresswell)]

I should have added: per TaskMan and Process Lasso, nobody seems to be
hogging the CPU. 1 percent is about as high as any one app gets....
which sounds suspicious to me on it's face.

 

[Paul]

I should have added: per TaskMan and Process Lasso, nobody seems to be
hogging the CPU. 1 percent is about as high as any one app gets....
which sounds suspicious to me on it's face.

Are you saying, if the transcode was started now, it runs at 1% ?

Or, are you saying that other background-like tasks
are using no more than 1% and consequently aren't slowing
down the important things ?

*******

I have seen a problem, where after several hundred gigabytes of
writes to an NTFS file system on WinXP, the file system itself
seems to slow down. On my video capture card, the file system can
match the CPU usage (capture uses 35%, file system driver about the same).
It seems to be related to a pool memory problem, which I suspect
might be causes by some virtual machine software.

When I left a process like that running all night, the
next morning I was greeted by a "delayed write failure", which
means the NTFS file system was using so much CPU per transaction,
it could no longer keep up, and write attempts were timing out.
But at least the system didn't crash. And an OS gets "extra points"
for not crashing under pressure.

I doubt you have the same issue as me - you can try rebooting,
which might very well temporarily fix it, but that's not exactly
an answer. Or really of much diagnostic value either. You could
start by looking at Task Manager, and see if the "paged" or
"non-paged" entries are large.

This is my Task Manager right now:

Physical Memory (K)
Total 3144748
Available 2364192
System Cache 284703

Kernel Memory (K)
Total 82360
Paged 62476
Nonpaged 19884

The bottom three right now are tiny. I expect they're "pool".

More on the memory pool here.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/03/26/3211216.aspx

Paul

 

[Bob F]

I'd guess my PC is running at about 1/3 or 1/4th it's usual speed
while transcoding and ripping DVD files.

Just started a few hours ago.

- System drive has plenty space: 21 out of 49 gigs free.

- CPU temp per SpeedFan was running at 52-53C (ripping some DVDs
and doing some other transcoding at the same time), now that
the transcoding has stopped they're all between 35 and 45C.

- GPU temp about the same: 52-53C

- Can't find any warnings re/hard drives, but all I know to do
is check HD Sentinel's reports.


Intel Core2 Quad.

Only thing I can recall doing recently is changing SageTV to use
DirectX - and that was several days ago.

Suggestions?

It could be a drive problem. I had one drive that did this to me. I tried
running HDTune, and saw deep drops in the data rate. I finally decided the drive
was doing multiple reads to get a good one. Replaced it, and problem solved.

 

[Paul]

It could be a drive problem. I had one drive that did this to me. I tried
running HDTune, and saw deep drops in the data rate. I finally decided the drive
was doing multiple reads to get a good one. Replaced it, and problem solved.

The free version is perfectly good for a quick check. Use the Benchmark
to check overall read performance (no write on the freebie).
And Health Tab to give data like a HD Sentinel might.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The HDTune health tab is more technical than this.

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/HDSentinel_thumb.png

On HDTune, I generally check the ones shown with the red boxes around them.
They should be zero. The yellow marks here are bogus. Virtually every
drive I check, has yellow marks like this, and none of those
drives are dead or anything.

http://imageshack.us/a/img10/2134/cffn.gif

*******

It would be fun to look in Event Viewer too, just
in case something left a few bread crumbs for analysis...

Paul

 

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Paul:

Are you saying, if the transcode was started now, it runs at 1% ?

Yes.

 

[Stef]

I'd guess my PC is running at about 1/3 or 1/4th it's usual speed while
transcoding and ripping DVD files.

Just started a few hours ago.

- System drive has plenty space: 21 out of 49 gigs free.

- CPU temp per SpeedFan was running at 52-53C (ripping some DVDs
and doing some other transcoding at the same time), now that
the transcoding has stopped they're all between 35 and 45C.

- GPU temp about the same: 52-53C

- Can't find any warnings re/hard drives, but all I know to do
is check HD Sentinel's reports.


Intel Core2 Quad.

Only thing I can recall doing recently is changing SageTV to use DirectX
- and that was several days ago.

Suggestions?

Have you checked RAM usage? You didn't say how much you have. Sounds
like you're running out, and the system is going to virtual memory
which is a lot, lot, lot slower.

Stef

 

[Paul]

Per Paul:

Yes.

If it was a disk problem, the disk would have to be pretty sick
for that to happen.

You can use Administrative tools and the Performance plugin, to
chart disk read and write rates. Then see whether the transcoder
is doing thing in spurts or a steady dribble at a very low rate.
If things go in spurts, then the file system end is probably OK.
Whereas if data is on a steady dribble, then the file system could
be holding up things on read or write.

http://windowsitpro.com/site-files/...itpro.com/content/content/37933/figure_01.gif

The only hardware I know of, with a significant issue, was the
Throttlegate episode. Where some pre-built computers would
operate at an effective rate of around 100MHz, due to overly
aggressive clock throttling on overheat. And even if that happens,
the transcoder will be pegging the Task Manager graph at 100%.
It's just the transcode will happen at a lethargic pace if that
happens. Other than that case (which applied to a couple of
machine models), normally that kind of thing isn't a significant
influence.

For the transcoder to run at 1%, it would need to be data
starved on source or destination. Or, an AV product could
be interfering (reading the data as the application reads
the data). But even so, no interfering sources I can think
of, would drop the transcoder to a 1% level.

Even if you use Task Manager to change the run priority of the
task, it's not going to drop that low.

Paul

 

[Nil]

Suggestions?

Do you get the sense that the whole system is slow, or is it just the
hard disk, or it is just the DVD drive? Maybe the HD or DVD has slipped
out of DMA mode back into PIO. I've had that happen when the optical
drive has encounted errors while reading, and I've had to go into
Device Manager to set it back to DMA mode.