How can I track down what a program is reading from/writing to?

Question

In the past week, I've found that IntelliJ IDEA has become insufferably slow, with constant periods of freezing outright for as much as 30 seconds at a time. When this happens, Process Explorer indicates that my IO is being hit pretty hard, but other than that, I have no clear indication as to what is being read.

I've tried also looking at the Resource Monitor for Windows 7, but there's no indication here either, as it seems like it's unable to see what the process is doing while it's frozen. I've expanded the Disk Activity and Storage sections, but they have very little if any information in them, and the times there is any details there at all, shows values only in the bytes.

Is there any way I can track down what idea64 is doing, given that Process Explorer claims it's reading upwards of 577MB/sec at a time? I need to find out if this is a software or hardware issue, as things have become damn near unusable.

Answer 1

To see which files get sued by an applciation you need to install the Windows Performance Toolkit, which is part of the Windows 10 SDK (for Windows 7, you must use the Windows 10 SDK v1511-Build 15086, newer SDK/WPT versions no longer run on Windows 7).

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Run WPRUI.exe, select First Level, DiskIO, FileIO and click on Start

Capture the IO activity of IntelliJ IDEA and press Save

Now open the generated ETL file in Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA.exe)

, load debug symbols in WPA.exe.

Now drag & drop the Disk Usage and File I/O graphs from Storage to the right side

and analyze the DiskIO and FileIO usage.

Here you can see exactly what IntelliJ IDEA does.