After large data transfers, system lags and slows down, why?

[MrCraphead]

I've had this problem for a few years now, and I have no idea why it is. Regardless of how many programs I have running, or how much RAM I have, or what speed CPU I have, after I transfer a huge amount of data from 1 HD to another, Windows always seems to act real sluggish and slow for a good 5 min afterwards or so. I have no clue as to why it does that. Everything is slower, Start menu pops up slower, other programs start slower, but after a while, windows seems to "clean itself up" and goes back to normal operating speed.

Does anyone know why this is? Is it b/c of the motherboard chipset? I've been using VIA chipset for a few years now. Any insight would be appreciated, thanks!

 

[dguy6789]

exactly how large of files are we talking and how much ram? The same thing will happen after playing ut2003 for a while. To no slow donw, your ram size must excede the file size. The reason is your system puts its windows components into a swap file on your harddrive(a very slow process) to free up ram to use for the transfer. once that transfer is done, windows will try to swap the info it put there earlier back into ram(another slow process). That could be the reason. After a file transfer, jus go get a beer or coke or whatever and wait, or do it the easy way, buy 1 gig of ram

 

[MrCraphead]

I was transferring files from my 120 GB HD to my 60 GB HD in about 5-6 GB increments. I have 512MB DDR RAM, and I've manually changed my swap file so windows won't be continually changing it.

But your explanation makes sense. I suppose it's just the swap file that's getting used, and it'll be the same with every chipset. :\

 

[bsobel]

As the other poster said, for very large transfers windows will continue to allocate as much memory as it can (and swap out programs to make more) for the file system cache. After the copy is over the cache will shrink back down. I've never completely agreed with the behaviour, I'd prefer a cap on the file system cache to say 70% of available memory (which would help alot), but I dont' believe that is currently tunable as it was in 9x.

Bill

 

[MrCraphead]

Um, I do believe I have already stated that I have manually set the swap file size, so that windows wouldn't continually change it. I set the min and max size both to 768.

Oh, and I'm running Windows XP Pro SP 1. I have no idea what you're talking about, Windows 9x.....

 

[kehi]

I would like to help but all I can say is that my systems do that when copy over 1gig (divx movies) or so to a HDD from cdrom drives. I am also running XP Pro with 512mb of ddr and feel the pain

 

[bsobel]

Skipping the swap file for data, the behaviour I mentioned can also cause pages to be swapped out that are reloaded from memory backed files (e.g. portions of applications).
Bill