Wierdness with Windows XP 64-bit edition

[KimB]

In order to get my new SLI setup to work, I've installed Windows XP 64-bit edition, and I'm really wondering whether this is normal Windows XP behavior or not, and whether or not there's a known fix.

Anyway, here's the problem: when there's a program that's accessing the hard drive a lot (e.g. installation programs), the entire system slows down. This never used to be an issue under Windows 2000. Has anybody else noticed this issue?

My first guess would be that Windows XP uses its swap file very frequently, and when I'm writing to/reading from the hard drive all the time, it can't access the swap file quickly. I'm sure it's not CPU usage with respect to the reads/writes, because not only is CPU usage low in these situations, but I'm running a dual-core processor, so CPU usage should be a non-issue either way.

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

how much ram are you sporting? is your swap space setup adequate?

do you have a sharing I/O bottleneck issue on your hard drive? (everyone wants to use it at the same time)...many things (i/o intense) running at same time?

you have a meter on your CPU/ I/O / mem mgr (like task mgr)?

sounds like you have a sweet rig, as long as you could also afford 2G or more or RAM.

 

[KimB]

2GB of RAM, so that's not an issue. At the time of the original post, I had a 2GB swap partition set (with invariable size).

What I've done more recently, however, is changed the swap file to a partition on my second hard drive, one that I initially made for making bootable CD images, so it's only about 650MB (but that should be more than enough with 2GB of RAM....I'd do away with swap entirely with this much RAM if I could). This seems to have helped quite a bit, but Windows still slows down on things that shouldn't be accessing the hard drive at all, like clicking on the start menu (this is, of course, when there's a program that's already accessing the hard drive heavily).

Typically, when I'm installing something, total memory usage is just a few hundred megabytes, and yet 2/3rds of the kernel is listed as paged. It'd be really nice if I could find a way to tell Windows to not use the swap file at all unless absolutely necessary, since its use will be extremely rare with my setup.

 

[Rodéric]

Updating all your drivers (especially MoBo) might help.

 

[RussSchultz]

Don't use xp-64 would help, too.

The driver model is somewhat different and you're going to find a lot of drivers have issues with it.

Is there a reason you need to use xp-64?

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

i'd be skeptical of a 650M swap space. expecially with driver issues of various flavors.

i run about 3G of swap with 1G ram on my p4 1.4. there's something not quite 'kosher' on assuming if you have 1G ram you don't need much swap. so maybe that translates over to the 64bit arena with lots of ram. is the partition a 'backwater' partition on the disk?

it it's "click on start button" type lag. i suppose it's not competing I/O bound processes. and if your cpu doesn't show being pegged, i would click on the swap maintenance tool and up it to about 3-4 gig. make sure it's got a contiguous chunk somewhere i guess, on a good place on disk. i suppose that's not so much an issue (contiguous good spot) on ntfs though (i hear).

what does your taskmgr(all guages) show while all this is going on?

 

[t0y]

Unless you need more than 1 gig of ram all the time, having 3gb of swap space is insane!
In fact, both my 512mb systems have a 768mb swap baseline, with a maximum value of 1.5 and I have yet to see windows complain about it. I haven't even noticed it going over the baseline and maybe that's because windows cuts it off during boot, but I don't recall swapping over the limit ever being a limiting performance factor, in my personal experience, of course.

If I had 2gb of RAM I'd try setting the swap space to a bare minimum of 256mb or so since turning it off completely may have adverse effects (windows uses it for some tidying up operations).
With 3gb you're basically inviting the system to dump everything in there!!

Really, you should try running your high memory intensive apps and check the peak commit charge in the task manager, to make sure you're not exaggerating.

PS: About the original issue, I'd put my money on russ and ingenu on this one. It's a very common problem with drivers, even in XP32.

 

[KimB]

Well, it doesn't look like I'm going to get any more recent drivers than the 6.66 ones from nVidia's site, at least not yet.

Anyway, XP64 has been pretty disappointing so far. Hell, I had fewer driver and software troubles when I first installed 64-bit Linux!! Looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and reinstall Windows XP a second time, this time the 32-bit version. Oh, well.

Edit: Case in point: my TV card works fine under 64-bit Linux, but there don't appear to be any drivers for it currently for 64-bit Windows. My bundled Nero CD writing software similarly wants me to buy a new version of Nero to work in 64-bit Windows. My 64-bit Linux installation comes with X-CD Roast, which works just fine.

 

[Jawed]

There's a little utility called XP_PageFileMon.

On my 2GB system it was indicating that my peak swap file usage was about 100MB - though normal usage was in the region of 30-40MB. I set it to 512MB static (from 2GB static).

I set XP to run as a server rather than as a desktop, seems a little better.

But there is some fundamental flaw, I believe, in low-level operations that means highly intensive disk operations (e.g. copying a 5GB file from one disk to another) hit Windows's responsiveness. Naively, I'd liken it to IRQ thrashing, but I don't know what it is.

Another useful utility is WinLauncherXP, which you can use to "nice" programs, but I don't think it's specifically going to help here.

Jawed

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

i upped my swap from 1G to 4G (max) on my box when i bought boiling point game. which has over a 2 G process footprint (2.18G i think). and it provided a good bit of improvement with that game, so i left it. most of the apps i run on my pc are games. and my antique rig performs really well.

when it was a 1G, i had allowed the pc to set it. anyway i was told swapping isn't so cut and dry as if you have say 4G ram you don't need it (which would be my initial impression) for today's apps.

of course im not claiming to know what's best, it's just what i would try next, given the symptoms.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I bought more RAM because 512mb was not cutting it for BF2. I had my swap set to 768 and I got some "Windows is running out of virtual memory" type errors. I had to put it all the way up to 1.5 gigs so I could run that game.

I know WinXP64 has steeper memory requirements than the 32 bit edition. You shouldn't have to set your swap space any higher than what your most demanding use needs. There is no benefit to setting your swap extremely high from what I can understand.

 

[KimB]

Yeah, but see, I have 2GB of RAM, and when I've looked at it, I've rarely ever had my programs use more than half of that. Under typical usage scenarios for my computer, I basically have 1-1.5GB of hard drive cache for much faster load times.

I just don't believe, then, that the size of the swap file is of issue here. But I have noticed some benefit by placing the swap file on my second hard drive (which has only one partition readable by windows, the swap file being the only file on that partition).

 

[Frank]

If I had 2GB RAM, I would turn off the swapfile completely. That way, the default amount of the kernel isn't paged either.

I have 1GB now, and I sometimes turn it off already, until I have some application that needs more.

 

[KimB]

If I had 2GB RAM, I would turn off the swapfile completely. That way, the default amount of the kernel isn't paged either.

I have 1GB now, and I sometimes turn it off already, until I have some application that needs more.

Hrm, I didn't do that because Windows 2000 refuses to work without any swap file (that is, after rebooting, it complains that there is none, and creates a small one).

 

[Frank]

If you have no swapfile (with NT or XP) and you run out of memory, Windows will automatically start discarding discardable blocks of memory, so the total amount of memory used is actually smaller. Activate the virtual memory column in the task manager to see. And as that memory isn't actively used (it's mostly for convenience or keeping stuff that might be used again some time in the future), you won't notice much of that.

 

[KimB]

If you have no swapfile (with NT or XP) and you run out of memory, Windows will automatically start discarding discardable blocks of memory, so the total amount of memory used is actually smaller. Activate the virtual memory column in the task manager to see. And as that memory isn't actively used (it's mostly for convenience or keeping stuff that might be used again some time in the future), you won't notice much of that.

Er, actually, I just checked the swap file section in the settings, and it states that the minimum swap file for XP is 16MB. So how do you run without a swapfile?

 

[Frank]

Er, actually, I just checked the swap file section in the settings, and it states that the minimum swap file for XP is 16MB. So how do you run without a swapfile?

I don't know. If I turn it off, that seems to work as expected. It leaves the actual file on the disk, but you can delete it and Windows won't create a new one unless you turn it back on.

 

[KimB]

Ah, excellent I didn't expect that to work, as it doesn't under Windows 2000. Much more responsive now when doing lots of hard drive accesses (reinstalling Chronicles of Riddick now just to test it ). God, why does Windows use a swap file when you have enough memory to not need one 99.9999% of the time?

 

[Rodéric]

Because swap is meant to free memory of unused libraries, but still have them handy in case they are required again.
Most OS (if not all) have a swap file or partition, and noone ever complains (think linux, BSD, BeOS...).

As long as it just works why do you care ?
It's surely not with the massive HDD with have today that you care about 1GB of space... (when it's to be usefull)

 

[KimB]

That's just the point, though: most OS's don't start using the swap file unless it's actually helpful. It rather sucks to be forced to turn off my swap file for maximum performance.