Vista and excessive paging activity

[cluberti]

So far, in using RC2, I've found that under decent, everyday usage of the system, 1GB of RAM is not enough to keep Vista Ultimate or Home Premium happy. I've always used previous builds of Ultimate and Home Premium on machines with 4GB - 16GB of RAM (or more), but I figured that Vista would likely be installed on machines with 1GB of RAM or less for a good portion of the Vista userbase. I have an Athlon 3700+ machine with 1GB of RAM, no audio, and a Radeon x200 video chipset lying around usually doing testing before I christen code, or use it as a test of a new RIS build or OS image on "real hardware" outside of a VM to be certain it works properly, so I installed Vista Ultimate on it, both x86 and x64, to see how it performed. I hit the paging file so often on both x86 and x64 doing nothing more than web browsing, email in Outlook 2007, and once in a while using Windows Media Player or iTunes 7, that I was utterly appalled at how often I could completely slow the OS to an absolute crawl while the paging file was being hit, or NT volume information was being written to disk. If I moved the paging file to a different physical hard disk, obviously the problems went away completely. I could also alleviate the problems for the most part by bumping RAM up to 2GB on x86 and ~2.5GB on x64. I reinstalled both Home Premium and Ultimate - x86 and x64 versions both - several times, and upgraded a clean XP and XP x64 install twice, just to be sure, with similar results each time. In fact, I could make it happen right out of the box, nothing installed at all other than what came with a stock install, by opening only a few IE windows or tabs - if I then did something requiring UAC (like open perfmon), the issue would occur about 50% of the time.

Of note, it didn't seem to matter whether I had full Aero enabled or was in Windows classic, nor did it seem to matter whether the disk used as the OS volume was a 7200RPM IDE or SATA drive, or a 10K SATAII drive, nor where I ultimately moved the paging file. I also have a USB key used with ReadyBoost during my testing, and it did not improve the situation at all when in use, nor was the performance any different without it during testing.

I have previously experienced zero issues with Windows XP or Debian, x86 or x64, on this same hardware. Also note that all drivers installed on this machine were detected and installed during setup, and are correct for the hardware installed. Thus, I'm considering filing this as a serious RC2 issue, so I want to ask those of you running RC2 - has anyone else run into this particular scenario? Or perhaps it is just this machine? I worry that, if others are seeing this, it is likely that users getting an OEM machine from a vendor will only have one hard disk and run into this as well. Again, it could just be this hardware specifically that doesn't like Vista, so I wanted to ask.

Edited October 10, 2006 by cluberti

[fizban2]

I have seen this issue, but i do have a laptop with 512 ram that does write out to page very very often when i have a few apps open, on my test machine i will pull a gig of ram and see how much that changes vista's preformance. out of curiosity what HAL does your vista machine see? (not really related but a question of my own)

[cluberti]

My hal is a uniproc ACPI x64 PC.

[KamiQuazi]

I'm not having this problem at all and im on the RC2, im using 1gb also with a amd 64 3500+... have u tried updating the drivers?

[Spooky]

I rarely see any paging, I have 4GB of memory.

[fizban2]

I rarely see any paging, I have 4GB of memory.

the problem isn't with more then 2 gigs of ram, with 1 gig or so then you start to see the paging issue,

[cluberti]

I'm actually getting some reports of this from elsewhere as well, and I'm not the first to have reported it either. It appears that this is indeed an issue in certain hardware scenarios, and it's being looked into. I've also been able to narrow it down to happening only when I'm doing some specific functions that invoke a UAC prompt, or visiting sites that load certain ActiveX controls in IE. Again, still trying to narrow it down to exactly when it happens and when I can repro it 100%, but I'm getting around 80% repro now, so I'm hopefully getting close.

Glad to hear this isn't widespread though.

[fizban2]

I'm actually getting some reports of this from elsewhere as well, and I'm not the first to have reported it either. It appears that this is indeed an issue in certain hardware scenarios, and it's being looked into. I've also been able to narrow it down to happening only when I'm doing some specific functions that invoke a UAC prompt, or visiting sites that load certain ActiveX controls in IE. Again, still trying to narrow it down to exactly when it happens and when I can repro it 100%, but I'm getting around 80% repro now, so I'm hopefully getting close.

Glad to hear this isn't widespread though.

cluberti, what are u using to capture the occuernces? just the perfomance mon?

[cluberti]

I'm using perfmon, windbg, and taking sporadic memory dumps of the machine in state

[fizban2]

cluberti,

on a 2.4 core duo, 1 gig ram, x64 5744, i see almost no paging until i start at least 2 VMs regular usage and application open sees very little page files usage. nothing irregular on UAC or activex prompts. only using permon though

[Rob_R]

Hello Everyone, new to the forum and looking to get some of everyones feedback on my experiences and issues with Vista.

I have RC2 Build 5744 installed, although I am dual booting XP I have not used XP since I first installed RC1 Build 5600. Everything I needed to do for my job at work I can do through Vista now.

In regards to the excessive paging I can't say I see it often, although at times I see a lot of HD activity it doesn't slow my system down. I'm running Vista on my Dell D820 laptop with 2GB of RAM and the 256MB Nvidia Quadro card. All drivers for all hardware was accounted for since the first install of RC1, I have upgraded twice and can say that everything has been stable although it seems build 5744 is more sluggish then 5728 was. I don't think the drivers that Vista installed for my video card are that optimized which could account for some of the "sluggishness", waiting for some new graphic drivers to test that.

[fizban2]

Hello Everyone, new to the forum and looking to get some of everyones feedback on my experiences and issues with Vista.

I have RC2 Build 5744 installed, although I am dual booting XP I have not used XP since I first installed RC1 Build 5600. Everything I needed to do for my job at work I can do through Vista now.

In regards to the excessive paging I can't say I see it often, although at times I see a lot of HD activity it doesn't slow my system down. I'm running Vista on my Dell D820 laptop with 2GB of RAM and the 256MB Nvidia Quadro card. All drivers for all hardware was accounted for since the first install of RC1, I have upgraded twice and can say that everything has been stable although it seems build 5744 is more sluggish then 5728 was. I don't think the drivers that Vista installed for my video card are that optimized which could account for some of the "sluggishness", waiting for some new graphic drivers to test that.

good to hear that cluberti's problem is probably tied to the hardware he is working with. thanks for the input rob, and welcome to the forums!

[cluberti]

Oddly enough, I've tracked it back down to my audio driver for the POS realtek chipset on board. After doing some "surgery" on the drivers, I've verified that the signed Realtek drivers are nothing more than a basic rebrand of their XP x64 drivers, which appear to be causing the issue in Vista. I've swapped them out for drivers for the HD Realtek audio drivers I have installed on my laptop (not signed), and I've gotten everything working without the paging activity. Seems odd, but it's the darned audio drivers.