Guest Posted January 10, 2015 Posted January 10, 2015 I recently made the switch from XP x86 and am noticing Windows 7 really bogging down at times when I would only experience slowdowns on XP during huge file copying operations. I have 4 GB of ram and even though XP could not see all 4 GB it hardly ever used any of the memory and as a result I experienced a snappy OS. I remember when I was trying the 32 bit flavor of Windows 7 that the performance, while slower, was a close match. With the 64 bit variety its really noticeable how much less snappy it is. Right now, Task Manager is showing it using half my memory and I'm not doing much. To get that much ram usage on XP, I would have to be doing an awful lot if I am remembering correctly. I think I remember reading that once you go 64 bit you wont see any benefit unless you drastically increase your ram. So is this my problem? I need like 16 GB of ram on 64 bit before I'll get the same snappiness that I did on XP?Should I, in the interim, switch to the 32 bit version of W7 to get better performance since I only have 4 GB or ram right now? I'm on a Sandy Bridge i5 so the CPU is not the issue.
jaclaz Posted January 10, 2015 Posted January 10, 2015 More probably 8 Gb are needed. The "switch" with 4Gb or 6Gb does not make much sense (as I see it) consider also how in any case a 64 bit OS needs to transfer more data from/to the hard disk, though with SATA speedish disk this should not affect noticeably performance. jaclaz
Guest Posted January 10, 2015 Posted January 10, 2015 You mention it needs to transfer more data to the disks. I'm not doing any big file copy operations at the moment so is this still true? I just have Chrome, VLC and CrashPlan is running in the background backing up my computer to the cloud. I'll try and get 8 GB at least as soon as I can.
MagicAndre1981 Posted January 10, 2015 Posted January 10, 2015 What is slow? To show details about RAM usage, run RAMMap: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx
Guest Posted January 10, 2015 Posted January 10, 2015 (edited) Just everything in general doesn't feel as snappy as XP did. For instance, when I launch Chrome it takes a while for it to become responsive. Chrome acts that way sometimes because of a couple of extensions such as Adblock Plus and Tampermonkey. It's like waiting for them to do something before it gets on with things. This behaviour happens in XP also but not to the extent that it's happening in Windows 7 64 bit, I'll see about posting a video capture in a minute....maybe. I fired up RAMMap and took a quick glance but in the middle of something. Edited January 10, 2015 by -X-
Guest Posted January 10, 2015 Posted January 10, 2015 (edited) Here's the vid. It's actually doing better than usual when I captured it. The thing with Chrome is that it is almost instantaneous after you click the shortcut. In the video, you notice there is a slight delay and then a further slight delay before the apps are displayed. It's not much in this capture but its there. In XP there was no delay in launching. That's why I gave up on Firefox. It took seconds to launch where in Chrome it was instant like old IE's. EDIT: I know now why it's acting much faster in the video above. I hid my bookmarks bar while doing the capture because I don't want everyone seeing my bookmarks. Once I re-enabled it, Chrome needs to pull all the favicons and stuff and paint them and it's way, way slower than in the video above. After that it then has to paint the app shortcuts so it's even longer before it settles down. Edited January 10, 2015 by -X-
MagicAndre1981 Posted January 11, 2015 Posted January 11, 2015 (edited) Install the WPT and run this command: xperf -on PROC_THREAD+LOADER+CSwitch+DISPATCHER+DISK_IO+DISK_IO_INIT+FILENAME+FILE_IO+FOOTPRINT+VIRT_ALLOC+MEMINFO+VAMAP+REFSET+MEMINFO_WS+PROFILE -stackwalk CSwitch+ReadyThread+FileCreate+FileCleanup+FileClose+FileRead+FileWrite+FileSetInformation+FileDelete+FileRename+DiskReadInit+DiskWriteInit+DiskFlushInit+VirtualAlloc+VirtualFree+PROFILE -buffersize 4096 -MaxFile 2048 -FileMode Circular && timeout -1 && xperf -d C:\temp\diagslowWindows.etl capture a 30-60s of the slowness, press a key to stop the logging. compress the ETL file (to reduce the size), upload the zip (OneDrive, dropbox) and send me a link via PM. Edited January 11, 2015 by MagicAndre1981
Guest Posted January 11, 2015 Posted January 11, 2015 (edited) Got an error...xperf: error: -stackwalk: Unknown flag 'CSwitchReadyThread' (line 1, character 1)xperf: error: -stackwalk: at: CSwitchReadyThread+FileCreate+FileCleanup+FileClose+FileRead+FileWrite+FileSetInformation+FileDelete+FileRename+DiskReadInit+DiskWriteInit+DiskFlushInit+VirtualAlloc+VirtualFree+PROFILExperf: error: -stackwalk: ^First it told me to set the DisablePagingExecutive tweak to 1 and I did that. Not sure if I should have. It was horrible a while ago. The system was using 3.8 GBs of my 4 GBs of memory. Chrome was using the bulk of it after I was browsing for a while with a bunch of tabs open. Edited January 11, 2015 by -X-
bphlpt Posted January 11, 2015 Posted January 11, 2015 Looks like you missed a "+" CSwitch+ReadyThread vs CSwitchReadyThreadCheers and Regards
jaclaz Posted January 11, 2015 Posted January 11, 2015 You mention it needs to transfer more data to the disks. I'm not doing any big file copy operations at the moment so is this still true? Generally speaking, yes, as a matter of fact I said "to/from", though as said it is not most probably the issue at hand. Each and every OS executable file compiled for 64 bit will be a bit larger than the corresponding one for 32 bit, or, if you prefer, the typical 32 bit install requirement is within 16 Gb, whilst the 64 bit will be around 20 Gb. jaclaz
MagicAndre1981 Posted January 11, 2015 Posted January 11, 2015 you miss the + . copy/paste the command into the cmd.
Guest Posted January 13, 2015 Posted January 13, 2015 Sorry for delay. I did it put it just sorta hung and it threw up an error and then stopped by itself. I think it captured it though. I'll PM you know if you're still willing to look at it. This is the error I saw...
Tripredacus Posted January 13, 2015 Posted January 13, 2015 Are you missing a \ in your path at the end? Should it be C:\temp\diagslow\Windows.etl ?
MagicAndre1981 Posted January 13, 2015 Posted January 13, 2015 the kernel.etl is useless. You must adjust the path. Make sure you have a directory C:\temp or change the path
MagicAndre1981 Posted January 14, 2015 Posted January 14, 2015 the slowness in the trace is caused by TrustedInstaller which install updates (CPU usage) and downloading videos via bittorent (this causes a high disk usage).I see volsnap.sys calls, so try to disable system restore for drives where you only download data or replace the HDD with a SSD.
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