Heavy disk activity repoerted by Win10 slowing down system

[Goi]

Hi,

I have a new 2016 Dell XPS13 that supposedly has a fast M.2 NVMe 256GB SSD. I've benched it to over 1.5GB/s throughput. However, I'm frequently encountering slowdowns, and when I look at task manager, I see that during many of those slowdowns, disk activity goes up to 100%. I haven't managed to see what's the offending process, but at least 1 time I'm seeing "System and compressed memory".

Granted, this is my workhorse and I have a Ubuntu VM running, dozens of tabs on Chrome, PDFs, Office docs open, etc. I would expect the memory to be the bottleneck here actually (only 8GB RAM), which I sometimes see, but I'm kinda surprised the disk activity could be the bottleneck.

The disk is only about half full btw.

Thoughts?

 

[bradly1101]

Increasing memory will cut down on paging.

 

[Compman55]

I have 32GB and having chrome, FF, anf IE11 running in w7, it will all show "in use" with only a sliver in free or modified.

Your memory is the bottleneck. 8GB is now the min, 16 is average, and 32 is great.

 

[biffosaur]

I have 32GB and having chrome, FF, anf IE11 running in w7, it will all show "in use" with only a sliver in free or modified.

Your memory is the bottleneck. 8GB is now the min, 16 is average, and 32 is great.

I've got the exact same issue as OP with 16gb in my Lenovo y410p.

I get this even with only a couple applications up and it's extremely annoying.

Then when I go to look at all of the processes running and their allocations it seems they are using an insignificant amount of hdd and memory resources...

I'm stumped on this one.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

You could also have a fair bit of 'background' stuff happening from Windows itself. There's some maintenance routines, Win Defender scans, etc that can be happening behind the scenes. In theory it's supposed to do this kind of stuff when you aren't using it, and it should be temporary, but MS has never been particularly good at this.

Check task manager -> Performance -> resource monitor, under disk, and take a look at processes performing a ton of read/writes, or opening a ton of files. That can start you down the rabbit hole of figuring out what windows is doing.

If it's mostly page file, start looking at a RAM upgrade. I wouldn't expect you to have to worry too much about paging with an SSD though.

 

[Compman55]

This reminds me of windows vista. This was kinda fixed once SP2 hit, and the platform upgrade was released. It made vista actually useable.

 

[tweakboy]

That is normal what he said.. gl

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Yeah, indexing. Still a thing with 7/10/server/whatever, but streamlined a bit. It can still thrash a drive though, unfortunately.

 

[KingFatty]

...

Check task manager -> Performance -> resource monitor, under disk, and take a look at processes performing a ton of read/writes, or opening a ton of files. That can start you down the rabbit hole of figuring out what windows is doing.

Just wanted to note something helpful about resource monitor under disk: you can sort by different columns. If you click on the column labeled "Total (B/sec)" then your system will sort the activities (either ascending or descending, if you click multiple times).

Anyway, sort the disk activities to find the biggest culprit contributing to total disk activity. It could be something errant. One known issue is that Microsoft Office telematics can sometimes go haywire and push disk usage to 100%. Or maybe another rogue program that needs to be patched/fixed.

 

[tweakboy]

You need more RAM,, gl

 

[Goi]

Thanks. I guess there's nothing much I can do then.

 

[Elixer]

Thanks. I guess there's nothing much I can do then.

Well, not until you find what is being such a hog.

 

[Goi]

From the earlier posts it seems like the 8GB memory is the bottleneck, and since that's soldered onto the laptop motherboard, I'm SOL.