vista page file

[almach1]

Vista only recently began accessing my hard drive alot. during games making games unplayable. company of heroes ran great,not it's choppy all of a sudden. when i quit the game the hard drive goes crazy for about 1 minute after i close it.

at idle, with only firefox open this is my physical memory stats in task manager:

physical memory
total 2046
cached 1559
free 50

page file 88m/4326m

is this normal for vista?

 

[Nothinman]

How do you know it's pagefile access anyway? It could be paging to/from pretty much any file on your disk.

 

[nZone]

put the pagefile on a separate hard drive. Implement ReadyBoost in tandem to cache it.

I do notice that during the shutdown process...my hard drive (light) is almost 100% solid for a few minutes.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: almach1
Vista only recently began accessing my hard drive alot. during games making games unplayable. company of heroes ran great,not it's choppy all of a sudden. when i quit the game the hard drive goes crazy for about 1 minute after i close it.

at idle, with only firefox open this is my physical memory stats in task manager:

physical memory
total 2046
cached 1559
free 50

page file 88m/4326m

is this normal for vista?

Those stats are useless.

Open the performance and reliability monitor, and look at the disk section, and check which files are being written/read from in real time.

The culprit could be the indexer (unlikely, but possible depending on your settings), system restore, or something like an anti-virus. You could also have malware.

 

[almach1]

brand new install. only have a few programs installed.nothing downloaded. the performance reliablity monitor doesn't help that much. it tells me a bunch of files are reading and writing, they all look windows files. nothing out of the ordinary. i went to the page file manager and set a custom 2gb size on the main hard drive. that seemed to help. I do have another HD partitioned in two parts with XP on it.

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: almach1
Vista only recently began accessing my hard drive alot. during games making games unplayable. company of heroes ran great,not it's choppy all of a sudden. when i quit the game the hard drive goes crazy for about 1 minute after i close it.

at idle, with only firefox open this is my physical memory stats in task manager:

physical memory
total 2046
cached 1559
free 50

page file 88m/4326m

is this normal for vista?

Those stats are useless.

Open the performance and reliability monitor, and look at the disk section, and check which files are being written/read from in real time.

The culprit could be the indexer (unlikely, but possible depending on your settings), system restore, or something like an anti-virus. You could also have malware.

To answer his question, yes these numbers are normal. And yes, they are pretty useless to assess as to why your HDD is trashing during gameplay.

However, the reason for HDD trashing after leaving a game is easily explained together with the numbers posted there. As one can see, most of the RAM is used by superfetch to cache frequently used applications . When you run a game that needs this RAM, vista will swap the cache to disk to free up the RAM you need - once you quit the game, it will fill the cache again. That is your HDD trashing after exiting the game.

Putting the swapfile on a seperate physical disk is always a good idea, be it under XP or vista. But I would definitely investigate the disk trashing during gameplay.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: almach1
brand new install. only have a few programs installed.nothing downloaded. the performance reliablity monitor doesn't help that much. it tells me a bunch of files are reading and writing, they all look windows files. nothing out of the ordinary. i went to the page file manager and set a custom 2gb size on the main hard drive. that seemed to help. I do have another HD partitioned in two parts with XP on it.

How brand new is new? Was that the first time you played COH on it?

 

[almach1]

actually company of heroes just gave me the blue screen of death, when i hit the menu key. I'm rebooting into XP and staying there. I'm tired of not being able to play the only two games i own in vista.

BF2 and 2142 punkbuster doesn't like vista no matter what I do

and

company of heroes doesn run right

i'll boot back into vista when nvidia and microsoft actually put a non-beta software out.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Griswold

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: almach1
Vista only recently began accessing my hard drive alot. during games making games unplayable. company of heroes ran great,not it's choppy all of a sudden. when i quit the game the hard drive goes crazy for about 1 minute after i close it.

at idle, with only firefox open this is my physical memory stats in task manager:

physical memory
total 2046
cached 1559
free 50

page file 88m/4326m

is this normal for vista?

Those stats are useless.

Open the performance and reliability monitor, and look at the disk section, and check which files are being written/read from in real time.

The culprit could be the indexer (unlikely, but possible depending on your settings), system restore, or something like an anti-virus. You could also have malware.

To answer his question, yes these numbers are normal. And yes, they are pretty useless to assess as to why your HDD is trashing during gameplay.

However, the reason for HDD trashing after leaving a game is easily explained together with the numbers posted there. As one can see, most of the RAM is used by superfetch to cache frequently used applications . When you run a game that needs this RAM, vista will swap the cache to disk to free up the RAM you need - once you quit the game, it will fill the cache again. That is your HDD trashing after exiting the game.

Putting the swapfile on a seperate physical disk is always a good idea, be it under XP or vista. But I would definitely investigate the disk trashing during gameplay.

Other than your last sentence, you're entirely wrong. The cached entry he provided is *NOT* the superfetch cache. Superfetch disk cache = free memory. Furthermore, the cache will not be paged out to disk, it's a disk cache after all, so what would be the point of paging to disk things that come from disk in the first place? Disk cache in memory is treated like free memory - it's dropped like it's hot when another program needs it.

Superfetch WILL make the disk thrash after you exit, but it's on a low priority i/o thread so theoretically it shouldnt get in your way. But most of the thrashing your experiencing after exiting isnt superfetch, it's a lot of stuff that WAS resident before you launched COH and it made room for it, which you now need again.

 

[almach1]

i've been running vista since 2 days after the launch. the game ran fine for 2 weeks. i handn't played in a while.

the only two things that maybe could of caused issue since then:

installed newest nvidia drivers 2 days ago

and

installed diskeeper home for vista and did a defrag of vista drive. (the boot time defrag didn't work. upon boot up, it only ran for like 5 seconds and said defrag was done.)

i don't think it was the video. graphics are smooth and all the planlife and characters move very fluently if i stand still. whenever i move to other parts of the map, he choppiness starts. makes me think it's the cpu and memory having problems.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: almach1
actually company of heroes just gave me the blue screen of death, when i hit the menu key. I'm rebooting into XP and staying there. I'm tired of not being able to play the only two games i own in vista.

BF2 and 2142 punkbuster doesn't like vista no matter what I do

and

company of heroes doesn run right

i'll boot back into vista when nvidia and microsoft actually put a non-beta software out.

Run BF2 and 2142 under XP compatibility with administrative rights, and it should run fine without PB thinking something suspicious is going on. Just go into the shortcut properties. It's sh*tty EA programming that's at fault there.

COH never worked right for me in Vista though. Dunno whether thats the game, driver, or OS that's at fault.

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: BD2003
Other than your last sentence, you're entirely wrong. The cached entry he provided is *NOT* the superfetch cache. Superfetch disk cache = free memory. Furthermore, the cache will not be paged out to disk, it's a disk cache after all, so what would be the point of paging to disk things that come from disk in the first place? Disk cache in memory is treated like free memory - it's dropped like it's hot when another program needs it.

Look it up here Superfetch does exactly what I said, it loads apps into RAM and drops it from RAM when RAM is needed - be it to the swapfile or just reloads it from disk, doesnt really matter - the disk is accessed again to load it. I'd really like to know how you come to the conclussion that the free memory entry is superfetch.

Superfetch WILL make the disk thrash after you exit, but it's on a low priority i/o thread so theoretically it shouldnt get in your way. But most of the thrashing your experiencing after exiting isnt superfetch, it's a lot of stuff that WAS resident before you launched COH and it made room for it, which you now need again.

Look at taskman and/or performance and reliability monitor after exiting a memory intensive app or game and you will see (in taskman) that cache is being filled again (again, what makes you think the "cached" entry is not the application cache?), and to take it even further, you can also check what resources have been swapped to disk to free memory and are being loaded again.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Griswold

Originally posted by: BD2003
Other than your last sentence, you're entirely wrong. The cached entry he provided is *NOT* the superfetch cache. Superfetch disk cache = free memory. Furthermore, the cache will not be paged out to disk, it's a disk cache after all, so what would be the point of paging to disk things that come from disk in the first place? Disk cache in memory is treated like free memory - it's dropped like it's hot when another program needs it.

Look it up here Superfetch does exactly what I said, it loads apps into RAM and drops it from RAM when RAM is needed - be it to the swapfile or just reloads it from disk, doesnt really matter - the disk is accessed again to load it. I'd really like to know how you come to the conclussion that the free memory entry is superfetch.

Superfetch isn't the free memory entry, but as far as windows is concerned, it's treated as "free" memory. It's instantaneously dropped when needed, it's contents are not paged to disk. Where are you reading that it is? Writing to disk what's already on disk is pointless, which is why it doesnt bother to do it. The disk is *obviously* accessed again to reload it, because it's a disk cache - everything in it came from the disk in the first place.

Superfetch WILL make the disk thrash after you exit, but it's on a low priority i/o thread so theoretically it shouldnt get in your way. But most of the thrashing your experiencing after exiting isnt superfetch, it's a lot of stuff that WAS resident before you launched COH and it made room for it, which you now need again.

Look at taskman and/or performance and reliability monitor after exiting a memory intensive app or game and you will see (in taskman) that cache is being filled again (again, what makes you think the "cached" entry is not the application cache?), and to take it even further, you can also check what resources have been swapped to disk to free memory and are being loaded again.[/quote]

Believe me, I'm on top of it. The "cached" entry you're referring to in taskman is absolutely *NOT* the superfetch disk cache - read the other thread about it near the top of the forum to understand.

The resources that were swapped to disk and are being reloaded again is not the superfetch cache, it's program memory that was written out to make room.

Much of this memory is part of what windows considers the "system cache" in the taskman, which is being refilled, but again...this is *NOT* the superfetch disk cache, it's something else entirely.

No argument that the superfetch disk cache is going to be refilled after exiting, it absolutely is. But that comes second to paging back in resident code memory (the "system cache").

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Griswold

Originally posted by: BD2003
Other than your last sentence, you're entirely wrong. The cached entry he provided is *NOT* the superfetch cache. Superfetch disk cache = free memory. Furthermore, the cache will not be paged out to disk, it's a disk cache after all, so what would be the point of paging to disk things that come from disk in the first place? Disk cache in memory is treated like free memory - it's dropped like it's hot when another program needs it.

Look it up here Superfetch does exactly what I said, it loads apps into RAM and drops it from RAM when RAM is needed - be it to the swapfile or just reloads it from disk, doesnt really matter - the disk is accessed again to load it. I'd really like to know how you come to the conclussion that the free memory entry is superfetch.

Superfetch isn't the free memory entry, but as far as windows is concerned, it's treated as "free" memory. It's instantaneously dropped when needed, it's contents are not paged to disk. Where are you reading that it is? Writing to disk what's already on disk is pointless, which is why it doesnt bother to do it. The disk is *obviously* accessed again to reload it, because it's a disk cache - everything in it came from the disk in the first place.

Superfetch WILL make the disk thrash after you exit, but it's on a low priority i/o thread so theoretically it shouldnt get in your way. But most of the thrashing your experiencing after exiting isnt superfetch, it's a lot of stuff that WAS resident before you launched COH and it made room for it, which you now need again.

Look at taskman and/or performance and reliability monitor after exiting a memory intensive app or game and you will see (in taskman) that cache is being filled again (again, what makes you think the "cached" entry is not the application cache?), and to take it even further, you can also check what resources have been swapped to disk to free memory and are being loaded again.

Believe me, I'm on top of it. The "cached" entry you're referring to is absolutely *NOT* the disk cache - read the other thread about it near the top of the forum to understand.[/quote]

Is that so? The entry in taskman was changed compared to earlier betas to reflect the impact superfetch has on memory usage. Before, it was confusing and made little sense, now it's clear: Cached = RAM used to cache frequently used data/apps, just like its described in the wiki link and that post you refered to.
And the behavior of it goes in line with my observations of the to be cached apps being loaded back into RAM when RAM becomes available again.

No argument that the cache is being refilled, it absolutely is. The resources that were swapped to disk and are being reloaded again is not the superfetch cache, it's program memory that was written out to make room.

Much of this memory is part of what windows considers the "system cache" in the taskman, which is being refilled, but again...this is *NOT* the superfetch disk cache, it's something else entirely.

As I said above, MS changed the layout of taskman to reflect that (in older betas, it was still refered to as systemcache with its whacky numbers known from XP). I dont see why you're arguing with me here anyway. The only thing we dont seem to agree on is the naming scheme in taskman and you just tell me "its something else entirely" - care to elaborate?

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Griswold
Is that so? The entry in taskman was changed compared to earlier betas to reflect the impact superfetch has on memory usage. Before, it was confusing and made little sense, now it's clear: Cached = RAM used to cache frequently used data/apps, just like its described in the wiki link and that post you refered to.
And the behavior of it goes in line with my observations of the to be cached apps being loaded back into RAM when RAM becomes available again.

System cache != Disk cache!

I don't have Vista on my system at work, but do me a favor and paste the description for "cache bytes" from performance monitor (double check its the same output as taskman). I'm pretty sure that particular entry is unchanged from XP.

Ptolemy's observation of epicycles explained how the sun revovled around the earth, and it was in line with his observation - that doesn't mean it was correct. Something is being reloaded, it's just not what you think it is.

As I said above, MS changed the layout of taskman to reflect that (in older betas, it was still refered to as systemcache with its whacky numbers known from XP). I dont see why you're arguing with me here anyway. The only thing we dont seem to agree on is the naming scheme in taskman and you just tell me "its something else entirely" - care to elaborate?

Like I said - post that description from perfmon to me so I can straighten it out. I went through all this in great detail when putting together my own system monitor, and I dont recall taskman being accurate. The explanation is in the other thread about memory management.

You've got the right idea, but it's like getting the right answer by doing the wrong calculations. Look at his numbers (unfortunately he didnt post PM used).

total 2046
cached 1559
free 50

2046-1559-50=437mb

Even though Vista isnt THAT bad of a resource hog, itll be a cold day in hell when it only uses 437mb for resident programs in physical memory on a 2gb system.

That cached entry is partially program memory, and partially disk cache (of OS files particularly). It's not the entirety of what superfetch does.

 

[Nothinman]

System cache != Disk cache!

No, but it probably contains the filesystem cache and it'll be so much larger than the other parts of the system cache that they'd seem like statistical noise. And SuperFetch should be treated just like any other data in the filesystem cache since the heart of SuperFetch is just a userland daemon that decides what to read in.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

System cache != Disk cache!

No, but it probably contains the filesystem cache and it'll be so much larger than the other parts of the system cache that they'd seem like statistical noise. And SuperFetch should be treated just like any other data in the filesystem cache since the heart of SuperFetch is just a userland daemon that decides what to read in.

I know for absolute 100% sure that the entirety of the superfetch disk cache is not represented by the "system cache".

From digging through the memory management in perfmon, there seem to be several different levels of priority in the disk cache..not all data is equal. I'd imagine that the portion of the disk cache represented in the system cache (the pageable OS code) is the last to be cleared.

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Griswold
Is that so? The entry in taskman was changed compared to earlier betas to reflect the impact superfetch has on memory usage. Before, it was confusing and made little sense, now it's clear: Cached = RAM used to cache frequently used data/apps, just like its described in the wiki link and that post you refered to.
And the behavior of it goes in line with my observations of the to be cached apps being loaded back into RAM when RAM becomes available again.

System cache != Disk cache!

I don't have Vista on my system at work, but do me a favor and paste the description for "cache bytes" from performance monitor (double check its the same output as taskman). I'm pretty sure that particular entry is unchanged from XP.

I'll have to translate it, since this isnt an english version of vista:

The sum of the indicators Memory\\Systemcache: Resident Bytes, Memory\\Systemdriver: Resident Bytes, Memory\\Systemcode: Resident Bytes and Memory\\Swap pages: Resident Bytes. This indicator only shows the last value, not an average.

I assume that is what you were looking for.

As I said above, MS changed the layout of taskman to reflect that (in older betas, it was still refered to as systemcache with its whacky numbers known from XP). I dont see why you're arguing with me here anyway. The only thing we dont seem to agree on is the naming scheme in taskman and you just tell me "its something else entirely" - care to elaborate?

Like I said - post that description from perfmon to me so I can straighten it out. I went through all this in great detail when putting together my own system monitor, and I dont recall taskman being accurate. The explanation is in the other thread about memory management.

You've got the right idea, but it's like getting the right answer by doing the wrong calculations. Look at his numbers (unfortunately he didnt post PM used).

total 2046
cached 1559
free 50

2046-1559-50=437mb

Even though Vista isnt THAT bad of a resource hog, itll be a cold day in hell when it only uses 437mb for resident programs in physical memory on a 2gb system.

That cached entry is partially program memory, and partially disk cache (of OS files particularly). It's not the entirety of what superfetch does.[/quote]

Ok, I can see where you're coming from. The cached entry in taskman does not tell the whole story in great detail - but its a rough summary nonetheless and doesnt indicate what I said is completely off.

 

[Nothinman]

I know for absolute 100% sure that the entirety of the superfetch disk cache is not represented by the "system cache".

That seems extremely unlikely, MS wouldn't waste resources tracking two of the same thing differently.

I'd imagine that the portion of the disk cache represented in the system cache (the pageable OS code) is the last to be cleared.

I'd imagine that it's not necessary to track it seperately because since it's almost always used it'll never be up for reclamation.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I know for absolute 100% sure that the entirety of the superfetch disk cache is not represented by the "system cache".

That seems extremely unlikely, MS wouldn't waste resources tracking two of the same thing differently.

I'm 100% sure of it, I did the digging and the math, with perfmons and everything and observed it all in real time. When I get home on my vista box I can lay it all out in detail. It's not that they're tracking two of the same things differently, just that there's set and subsets mixed into all those perfmon numbers, nothing is logically named or grouped, and it gets confusing real, real fast.

I'd imagine that the portion of the disk cache represented in the system cache (the pageable OS code) is the last to be cleared.

I'd imagine that it's not necessary to track it seperately because since it's almost always used it'll never be up for reclamation.[/quote]

I suppose that makes sense, but I'm just guessing. I dont know if it's actually the last to go.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I know for absolute 100% sure that the entirety of the superfetch disk cache is not represented by the "system cache".

That seems extremely unlikely, MS wouldn't waste resources tracking two of the same thing differently.

I'm 100% sure of it, I did the digging and the math, with perfmons and everything and observed it all in real time. When I get home on my vista box I can lay it all out in detail. It's not that they're tracking two of the same things differently, just that there's set and subsets mixed into all those perfmon numbers, nothing is logically named or grouped, and it gets confusing real, real fast.

So I was mistaken about that - the system cache entry in XP was so wacky, and Vista had such better tools that when I first figured all this stuff out, I completely ignored taskman. The vista tasksman says nothing about the "system cache", and just has an entry for "cache", which does include the entirety of superfetch, and then some. I went into detail in the other thread. It's still pretty misleading, but it's somewhat logical in a roundabout way now if you really think about it.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=34&threadid=2009619&enterthread=y

 

[Dutchmaster420]

make sure you have system restore off.... my raptor was going crazy and i couldnt figure out what it was...turned off system restore and its been quiet since


also...how can i put the pagefile on another hard drive in vista 64bit ultimate

ive never done this before

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: Dutchmaster420
make sure you have system restore off.... my raptor was going crazy and i couldnt figure out what it was...turned off system restore and its been quiet since


also...how can i put the pagefile on another hard drive in vista 64bit ultimate

ive never done this before

Yep!....first thing I turned off was System Restore, a good PC user has all his important software backed up anyway.

 

[vetteguy]

Originally posted by: Mem

Originally posted by: Dutchmaster420
make sure you have system restore off.... my raptor was going crazy and i couldnt figure out what it was...turned off system restore and its been quiet since


also...how can i put the pagefile on another hard drive in vista 64bit ultimate

ive never done this before

Yep!....first thing I turned off was System Restore, a good PC user has all his important software backed up anyway.

Hmm...maybe that's my problem. I have 4GB RAM in my Vista PC with a ReadyBoost drive, and it is constantly thrashing my Raptor. Sounds like it's going to explode. Is there anything "Vistaishly" weird you have to do to turn off System Restore?

 

[Dutchmaster420]

Originally posted by: vetteguy

Originally posted by: Mem

Originally posted by: Dutchmaster420
make sure you have system restore off.... my raptor was going crazy and i couldnt figure out what it was...turned off system restore and its been quiet since


also...how can i put the pagefile on another hard drive in vista 64bit ultimate

ive never done this before

Yep!....first thing I turned off was System Restore, a good PC user has all his important software backed up anyway.

Hmm...maybe that's my problem. I have 4GB RAM in my Vista PC with a ReadyBoost drive, and it is constantly thrashing my Raptor. Sounds like it's going to explode. Is there anything "Vistaishly" weird you have to do to turn off System Restore?

just go to control panel, click system and maintence, click system, then click advanced system settings in the left pane...then click system protection and uncheck your drive