excessive hard drive thrashing.

[nelsonm]

Hi all,

i have a desktop that has excessive hard drive thrashing whenever you do anything. The system is an old AMD HP running XP with 500mb of ram and the hd is only 20% full.

I did the following:
1. ran chkdsk
2. ran hd manufacturers diagnostics
3. disinfected the pc
4. defraged the hd
5. set the system to handle paging.
6. applied all MS updates and patches.

Everything checks out but the hd still thrashes excessively after startup and when accessing files or the internet.

Any clues?

 

[FoolishTech]

Probably a lot of paging to the hdd with such a lack of RAM. But could be any number of other issues at play. A combination of Sysinternals tools like process explorer and filemon might help you dig deeper to see what is doing what...

 

[iladelf]

Since you mention that the computer is old, besides what Foolish said, I'd put my vote in for the cause being the old hard drive itself. I remember in one of my old computers, I had constant hard drive thrashing, but the drive was old. Once replaced with a new one, the thrashing stopped.

 

[joydivision]

512MB is not enough for XP these days, many XP systems with a modern anti virus program often use more than 1GB of RAM.

I also suspect there may be a rootkit or something you need to have a look at Process Explorer and pay particular attention to what is svchost.exe as a lot of viruses like to run as DLLs under svchost so they won't show up under task manager etc.

 

[NETWizz]

Look at what processes are running and consuming memory via the Task Manager... and possibly upgrade RAM. Also, you should have low CPU usage at idle.

Something like this:

Next, look in the Resource Monitor and look at DISK I/O. You can click the "Resource Monitor" right in the task manager

It should tell you what is using the hard disk causing the thrashing. In the picture above, my Hard Disk was not being accessed at the time and over the last few minutes averaged a few reads of less than 1/10th of a MB.

If you see something always consuming disk IO it would be good to look into it.

 

[nelsonm]

With all the extra stuff XP has to do with all the service packs installed, most older systems i rebuild and update to SP3 show a marked slow down performance without more ram. As i said previously, thrashing starts whenever any user activity starts especially when starting a browser. If you leave the system alone the thrashing will stop until you try to use the system again. I did not see any one app in task manager causing problems. But installing and using Process Explorer would help.

I did not stop to think that an older hd with less performance and cache could also contribute to the slower performance with respect to general I/O thus prolonging hd activity (thrashing).

I suggested the client double the ram from 512 to 1gb - they all consider it. I also suggested a rebuild of the system to go along with additional ram.

In any case, if the client brings the system back, I'll try a few things as a learning experience:

1. clone the system on a new sata hd as a backup.
2. double the ram to see the thrashing decreases enough.
if not...
3. restore the factory image on old hd and bring the system up-to-date to see the thrashing decreases.
if not...
4. install the cloned hd with existing system to see performance improves and thrashing decreases.
if not..
5. restore the factory image on new sata hd and bring the system up-to-date to see the thrashing remains.

I'll keep you all posted and thanks the the hints.

 

[Captain Spaulding]

I had a customer with the exact same problem and he also had 512mb ram on XP. I used a spare HD and installed XP which ran fine ruling out any problem with the hardware.

It turned out to be a problem with AVG not sure what was wrong with it but it's process used all the RAM, I uninstalled it and put Avast on and it ran fine after. The HD was also badly fragmented.

 

[pcrepairtech]

buying a new hard drive might help