Hard drive activity right after starting Gmail

Question

If I leave the Gmail screen open but unused for some time (maybe an hour or more), the first time I try to use it the hard drive becomes active and everything is inaccessible. This goes on for a minute or two before everything settles down to normal. very annoying! Any thoughts? Thanks!

Answer 1

How much RAM does your system have? Gmail loads a whole lot of javascript and data, so if you don't access it for a long time, it's likely that the tab with gmail in it is being paged to virtual memory. When you switch back to that tab, the contents are loaded back into RAM from virtual memory, hence all the hard drive activity. Until that has been loaded, the page won't respond since the contents of the page haven't been loaded back into RAM yet.

To further clarify: when there isn't enough memory to go around on a computer, the operating system will make up for it by swapping data out of memory onto the hard drive. When something is unused, the data being stored in RAM for that thing is saved to the hard drive, in what is called a page file or swap file. This allows the memory previously occupied by this data to be used by some other application which is actively being used, while the unused application sits in the background. When you switch back, it swaps that data back into the RAM. This way, memory can be used wherever it is needed most.

Depending on how your system is configured, there may be several solutions to this problem. If it's affordable to do so, you could consider upgrading to more RAM. You could also try using a browser which has a lower memory footprint. For example, firefox uses a lot more memory to load any given page than chrome uses to load the same page. You could also try defragmenting your hard drive, since it takes longer to swap data from a page file on a fragmented hard drive. For Windows there is a tool called PageDefrag which will defrag the page file specifically.