Computer Running Slow -- Identifying what is causing the problem

Question

I was wondering what utilities can help identify what is causing a computer to slow down. I am a J2EE programmer and have WebSphere and eclipse continuously running on my computer and lately my computer seems to be running slower and slower. Corporate IT switched from semantic to mcafee a little while back and I'm not sure if there is extra scanning of my disks now which could be causing the problem. When I look at my CPU, it is only pegged @ around 50% and my memory usually runs with about 1.5 gig left for consumption. The stats for my PC currently are (pulled from task manager):

CPU Usage 63%

Totals

• Handles: 29174
• Threads: 898
• Processes: 77

Physical Memory (K)

• Total: 3652840
• Available: 4681956
• System Cache: 1893156

Commit Charge (K)

• Total: 2510164
• Limit 5161860
• Peak 4104944

Kernel Memory (K)

• Total 322576
• Paged 238296
• NonPaged 84168

I currently don't have a good grasp about what the memory usage really means, so if anything glaringly wrong is apparent please let me know.

Thanks, Jeremy

Answer 1

Given that it's the IT department pushing out McAfee, one possibility is that it's checking all files for viruses - including the files you're working on - and as you're making (relatively) lots of small changes to lots of small files this could be triggering lots of on access scans.

Talk to IT (through your manager if necessary) about getting your project directories excluded from the on access scans. You'd still need to do weekly(?) scans to be on the safe side.

If there are several developers you'll have to all unify on a single directory structure so that IT only have one extra rule to worry about.

Answer 2

Process Explorer is a nice tool to look and see what programs or services are running and their resource utilization, including child processes.

Also take a look at Process Monitor for viewing what is happening with the I/O System.

Answer 3

For me, the number of handles looks too high.

In order to check which process (or processes) are using so many handles, open the task manager, go to menu 'View - Select Columns' and select the 'Handle Count' check box.

Now, select the Processes tab in the task manager and find processes consuming large numbers of handles. On average it should be a couple of hundreds of handles per process with an exception for svchost.exe, which may reach a couple of thousands of handles.

Also, a constant CPU usage of 50% is not normal and you need to check in the Processes tab which process or processes are constantly using the CPU.

Answer 4

If your system works slow try to remove all the temporary files from your computer. Run disk clean up and disk defragmenter on your computer. Type Msconfig in RUN go to stsrt up tab and uncheck all the non microsoft services. Reboot your computer.

Answer 5

Have you tried a registry cleaner? Also try turning off unused start up processes. And you can run a Disk defrag.