Question My Flagship's graphics behavior, my web-browsing and home/LAN/network configuration

[BonzaiDuck]

Maybe this should be posted elsewhere. "Windows"? "Software"? "Networking"?

My absolutely stellar flagship system is back after months of troubleshooting a bad PSU wire, and before that -- a stupid accident that borked my USB controller and required motherboard replacement.

Even before the static-charge accident that borked my USB and motherboard, I'd noticed certain things.

I'm happy with my graphics card. It is a Gigabyte GTX 1070 OC "Mini". It's overclocked on an Afterburner "curve".

The system gets used for some gaming, but also for some serious business. Because I fear data-loss disasters, I keep my accounting files on my server upstairs -- connected by G-bit wired Ethernet. Various machines access the same files at different times. For the Quicken files, each machine backs up locally in addition to changing the file on the server. The server is both redundant and backed up. I also store my growing document archive on the server.

Oftimes, the Quicken and document management system remain open. I'm keen on managing our money, just as keen on referencing various documents in the archive -- many related to the money, others to our healthcare, property management -- everything.

Despite a very fast system (as I've seen it to be), the display response to keyboard activity in various software (for instance, my Office Outlook e-mail browser) slows down and gets sluggish. This occurs in proportion to times when I have multitudes of web-pages open in EDGE, and/or -- when I'm accessing the files on the server with the open applications. The more web-pages open, the more noticeable. And the network file access with the various applications also has a noticeable effect.

When I close those applications and the server file access, the sluggishness seems to disappear. Further, if I choose to game with my racing simulators with all those other files open in the background, I get frame dropouts and hesitation. When I close the internet access and server files, the games are peppy again.

Can someone explain to me what's going on with this? Is there a way to eliminate the behavior -- other than closing down web-pages and applications?

For someone who's been "doing micro-computers" since 1983, taught five programming languages and was the IT go-to guy in my finance department, I don't feel like any "expert" anymore. I'm 74 and suspecting that some brain-cells have gone south, like HAL the computer in Kubrick's film -- "Dave? My mind is going . . . . I can feel it . . . I can feel it . . . " Maybe someone can help me understand my graphics-slug phenomenon. If I need to, I can post this over in "Windows" or "Networking", but this seemed the place to start.

 

[Ajay]

Check you RAM utilization if task manager.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Check you RAM utilization if task manager.

Don't know why I hadn't done that. I'm rocking 32GB 2x16's, and I think I use only half of it for caching slow spinners. I've seen RAM usage climb to near-full capacity while using EDGE to watch TV over several days without closing the browser. That was on a different computer, but why would anything be "different"?

 

[Tech Junky]

Close the data leaking browser periodically. I do this with chrome because it bloats and leaks like a sieve. There's a way to do it with a bookmark to execute the command with a click.

 

[igor_kavinski]

It would help to make a separate dedicated browsing laptop or desktop if you hate closing browser tabs periodically. If it's a laptop, I would put in the DC500M SSD for excellent response times with heavy paging and maybe 64GB RAM.

If it's a desktop, you could get an Optane drive and 128GB RAM with something as slow as an i3-12100 because it's still very capable with 8 threads and browsing is more I/O bound in the case of multiple tabs.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Close the data leaking browser periodically. I do this with chrome because it bloats and leaks like a sieve. There's a way to do it with a bookmark to execute the command with a click.

Alternatively, open the Chrome task manager and start killing the worker processes that you see are consuming anything above 50MB. I'm usually able to reclaim enough RAM to get it to at least 40% free from 5-10% free and it just takes a few minutes.

 

[Tech Junky]

@igor_kavinski

For me it's how processes get handled in the browser even when not in the primary tab being used the browser still consumes a ton of RAM. I can imagine if you're using the browser like implied by Bonzai it's how resources are managed over extended periods of time.




Normally I can kill the instances of high RAM which in turns kills the tabs using the RAM and to get those pages back it does require a chrome://restart to restore the killed app within those pages.

Though killing those tabs / apps within chrome quiets the system considerably and drops the idle GPU resources from ~25% to 1-3% and then everything idles down including the fans due to the gpu not being engaged by those tabs.

Since Chrome / Edge are entangled with each other the underlying issue is more likely Edge. The opposite could be true using Firefox though as it's not using other components to run things. I haven't bothered using FF though in years because it's not really a high priority to resolve vs convenience of wrapping everything into Google and thus syncing to my phone (Android) without thinking about it.

Spawning processes within a browser is within reason of how they're designed but, it does get a bit out of control at times. I know which tabs are the issue consuming resources but choose to just keep them open out of convenience. Both of them are/were flash based games which is the tie to the GPU for the graphics.

Another thing I'm starting to despise more and more lately is javascript. I've never really liked it being invoked for pages but, disabling it on pages with blocker detection resolves the issue of them whining about not being able to skin telemetry data.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Normally I can kill the instances of high RAM which in turns kills the tabs using the RAM and to get those pages back it does require a chrome://restart to restore the killed app within those pages.

When I kill the high ram tabs/worker process in Chrome's task manager, the page will spawn a new worker process with initial lower ram consumption or if the page dies, I just refresh that particular tab only. I'll have to try using the chrome://restart command to see how it behaves for me.