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XP Performance Bottleneck

By djoseph ·
XP SP3 4GB RAM 4GB Virtual Memory on Defragged Seagate ST3250 250MB (e drive), c drive is RAID 1 ADC drives. ASUS P5Q-EM DO motherboard.

System will seem to be frozen except that disk drives can be heard thrashing madly in background. If I wait 30-40 seconds it will catch up. During that time Process tab of Task Manager never goes above 25% processor utilization. The commit charge is generally below 4800/7226M.

Performance setting in XP set "Adjust for Best Performance". I have optimized defragged ALL hard drives, cleaned up all temp files, run virus and malware scans with daily definition updates, defragged the registry, and using Smart RAM to free up RAM from 2 memory suckers (ACT! and MSSQL). The motherboard, Seagate, and clean XP install are only 4 months old.

What have I forgotten?

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RE: "c drive is RAID 1" ...

by OldER Mycroft In reply to XP Performance Bottleneck

RAID 1 with what? - Which other HDD?

If you do put the pagefile elsewhere, you should leave a small amount on C: - an initial size of 2MB with a Maximum of 50MB should be about right - so it can be used in emergency. Without this, the system is inclined to ignore the settings and either have no page file at all (and complain) or make a very large one indeed on the C: drive.

This 4GB Pagefile, why is it not 4.5GB (1.5 times available System RAM)? Is it just sitting on this 250MB HDD?

Or is the Pagefile in its own partition? You should avoid putting a paging file on a fault-tolerant drive, such as a mirrored volume (RAID-1) or a RAID-5 volume. Paging files do not need fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant systems suffer from slow data writes because they write data to multiple locations.

When the system seems to be frozen, what has it just been doing?

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Thanks

by djoseph In reply to RE: "[i]c drive is RAID 1 ...

C: is Raid 1 mirrored. Pagefile is on E: no RAID. Its size is 4,194,304. I had heard the 1.5 times. I will try that.

When the system hangs, it is often in Firefox, Outlook, Windows Explorer, or even task manager. ALT-Tab always brings up the change windows option, but the windows do not change during the freeze.

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See if this will help

by Jacky Howe In reply to XP Performance Bottleneck

Download these tools to help you find out what is causing the problems

Process Explorer

Under View, Select Columns, Process Performance, choose e.g. IO Write Bytes, IO Read Bytes. Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This uniquely powerful utility will even show you who owns each process.


FileMon

This monitoring tool lets you see all file system activity in real-time.

Process Monitor

Monitor file system, Registry, process, thread and DLL activity in real-time.


Sysinternals Process Utilities

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cb56073f-62a3-4ed8-9dd6-40c84cb9e2f5.aspx

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