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I've got a Lenovo Ideapad, with a dual core Atom processor and Windows 7 that exhibits some odd behaviour. It's insanely slow right after boot. The disk drive will be lit up solid and grinding away while both processors are pegged at 100%. If I leave it alone, it'll finish whatever it's doing in about half an hour and then run quite nicely. If I start any applications, not only is it frustrating to use (it can take 30 seconds or more to acknowledge a single click), but it keeps up the thrashing of the drive until about a half hour after I close all the applications. Once again, it'll run perfect if I then wait for the disk thrashing to stop before running anything.
I've run the performance monitoring stuff to try and find out what application it is, but unfortunately it appears to be internal to Windows. The process causing all the processor utilization and IOPs is PID 1, listed as "System". I've fiddled with all the power settings as well as the other basics (including disabling sleep/hybrid/hibernation, cleaning it up, etc). Nothing seems to make any difference.
Has anyone found a solution to a situation like this before or have some interesting diagnostic tricks to narrow it down?
Brian Knoblauch
Posted 2015-05-04T22:43:18.377
Reputation: 4 313
I think between the very slow processor, the slow HDD and only 1GB of RAM you cannot expect any performance. The thrashing is probably due to paging. If you can upgrade the RAM and change the HDD for a SSD, you will get much better performance. I own 2 systems with Atom quad core processors, 2GB of RAM and an eMMC (a kind of SSD). And even those are no barnstormers. – whs – 2015-05-04T23:16:34.107
I think you missed the point. It performs acceptably when running applications that consume RAM, etc after the initial tie-up right after boot. It's no screamer, but is fine except for this disk thrashing right after boot (even with no applications running). After done thrashing, it runs perfectly fine even with OpenOffice, Chrome, and an IDE open at the same time (and they startup and load just fine too as long as I don't do it until the initial disk thrash is done). – Brian Knoblauch – 2015-05-04T23:21:33.053
But the disk activity at boot is normal. It has to pull in a lot of code - probably close to 1GB. Figure out how much time that takes until that settles down. And when the 1GB of RAM does not suffice, then you get additional paging activity. – whs – 2015-05-05T00:42:20.057
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capture a boot trace: http://pastebin.com/rNZiExVU Here I can see what the system does.
– magicandre1981 – 2015-05-05T04:39:23.780@whs - I have an even slower, single core Atom machine here too, with the same RAM and also a slow laptop drive that does not exhibit the same issue. It settles in within a minute or 2 of booting. There's no reason for the faster machine to require over 30 minutes. Something abnormal is going on. – Brian Knoblauch – 2015-05-05T11:39:50.077
I haven't had time to capture the boot trace yet (SDK download takes awhile on DSL), but I ran across a Google article that suggested disabling superfetch. That made a tremendous improvement in responsiveness during as well as duration of disk thrashing. – Brian Knoblauch – 2015-05-05T22:44:23.743
Superfetch runs at very low IO priority so it doesn't really impact the performance. – magicandre1981 – 2015-05-06T17:48:06.307
Well. 30 minutes I agree. That is not normal for any machine. But in your post you were talking about a 30 second delay. – whs – 2015-05-06T20:39:37.207
It can take 30 seconds for the system to respond to input, but the thrashing was going on for 30 minutes... – Brian Knoblauch – 2015-05-07T22:25:58.123