High disk usage after recovering from standby in Windows 7 when switching from one app to the others

Question

I have a problem with my Windows 7 64bit (Sony VAIO Core i7, 6GB of RAM, 1TB HD with over 300GB of free space) that i hope someone can solve.

I frequently use Visual Studio and other CPU/memory intensive softwares for work, and quite frequently i avoid turning off my computer when i leave it so that i do not have to waste time restarting everything. My computer is already fine-tuned to start only the services that i need when i need them (no, i did not disable necessary services, only third party services that i rarely use) and i have already removed almost every useless pieces of junk from boot (again, third party softwares). The system is virus-clean, it is kept with great attention from several years now and works quite fine when freshly boot.

Instead of turning it off i put it in stand-by mode (not hybernation, just stand-by)... and this is the problem. Whenever i recover from a stand-by the system starts very fast... but then it uses a lot the disk for several minutes after recovering everytime i switch from one program to the other (say... Visual Studio to Chrome, etc). Sometimes the computer almost freezes for several seconds while i switch from one app to the other and this is VERY annoying (it even happened to freeze the mouse once or twice). After several minutes of switching back and forth from one app to the other the system seems to return to its normal state, but, as i said, this can take several -very annoying- minutes.

Does anyone know why this happens? It is almost like if when it is put to sleep the RAM is written to the disk and it is only read back to the RAM when the specific app is actually used (this shouldn't happen in stand-by mode, right?).

Is it there a way to to force it load everything (or at least specific softwares) back to RAM after a stand-by (via a command line utility or programmatically)? Is anyone experiencing the same problem with standbys?

I would like to avoid disabling the pagefile because some (rare) times i do use more than my physical size of RAM.

Thank you. Sorry for my horrible English (not native speaker), i hope my question is sufficiently clear though.

Answer 1

The reason why the disk thrashes on wake is due to hybrid sleep. This means that sleep mode acts like both regular ACPI sleep mode (where the system is put in a low-power state) and hibernate (where the memory is written to disk) to keep a balance between performance and reliability. So in case of power failure, the computer can always resort to using the hibernate/sleep file to recover your session.

Because the hibernate file was used, Windows will only read the parts of the hibernate file that correspond to the parts of the memory that currently need to be used, in order to save on resume time.

You can turn this feature off and just use regular sleep by going to the advanced power settings in Control Panel.