PC slowing down

[mikef]

nyt said:

OP - are any processes malfunctioning and just using memory?

Perhaps, next time that the machine gets slow, you could upload screen grabs of task manager with processes sorted for 1)CPU 2)Memory and 3)Disk IO.

I wish it had been that easy; when it's slowed down task manager is typically showing <2% CPU, >50GB of free memory and zero disk activity...

[Zad]

What typical temperature are you seeing from SpeedFan? Also, have you tracked the CPU frequency? It is under the "exotics" tab of SpeedFan.

It may be totally unrelated, but in the past I have had any number of problems with Norton products causing mysterious PC slowdowns. Is your paging file / swap space turned off? Its not uncommon for people with SSDs and large memory to forget to disable it, and it can cause premature ageing of an SSD, which leads to error correction and slowdowns. Unlikely at this stage in an SSD's life though.

[mikef]

Core temperatures (now that I have the fan profiles set to kick in sooner, I didn't check before but could do that) are around 55C under load. CPU is running at 3306MHz; I have only done the mildest overclocking of this CPU and that was automated, using the ASUS Express utility, as it does what I need at stock.

[anonymous-user]

mikef said:

Core temperatures (now that I have the fan profiles set to kick in sooner, I didn't check before but could do that) are around 55C under load. CPU is running at 3306MHz; I have only done the mildest overclocking of this CPU and that was automated, using the ASUS Express utility, as it does what I need at stock.

What about resetting it to stock just to compare
Pain in the neck but worth comparing

[mikef]

It's been at stock since I first had this issue, maybe 2 - 3 months ago

[deckster]

Have you considered dual-booting into a different OS for a while to see if the symptoms persist? That would at least isolate whether it was a software or hardware problem.

If it turns out to be a software problem then I'd put money on a complete reinstall being the fastest and most cost-effective way to fix it.

[mikef]

That's a thought, although it would be a bit of work to simulate workload under a non-Windows O/S

I'm really hoping to avoid a reinstall; dealing with license re activation for products like MS, Adobe and Origin is a total pain

I'm hoping for now that blasting all the fans a bit harder may sort things about, but will need a few days to confirm that.

Also had memtest running for 100 minutes now, I'll report back on that when it finishes

[Martin4x4]

Try System Internals has a much more comprehensive process explorer.

[mikef]

I must admit that I hadn't taken the temp readings when the fans were set to the quietest mode, so could well have been in excess of 55C. I could go back to that fan profile - and have a go with prime95 to see what the temps do

[mikef]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Ran memtest for 12 hours; 100% pass, zero errors

[mikef]

Thanks - I've just run Prime95 for an hour (screen shot of temps attached). Then re-run Geekbench, same score as at start of day



I'll try leaving it alone for 8 hours and see whether it exhibits the slow-down behaviour

I agree that this feels like a software service that's at the root of the issue, but I'd rather work out what that is rather than blast a carefully configured system; that has to be last resort

[WinstonWolf]

Martin4x4 said:

Try System Internals has a much more comprehensive process explorer.

This ^^ Sysinternals will get to the bottom of what's going on very quickly if it's SW related.

[mikef]

I've done all the usual SQL stuff and as this is a dev box it's not executing queries all (or even much of) the time and there are no long-running or particularly inefficient queries. Maximum server memory setting is 24,576 MB (out of 64GB), I set that when this started to happen

Plenty of free space - around 75GB on the system SSD, over 300GB on each of the database PCIe drives

[mikef]

WinstonWolf said:

Martin4x4 said:

Try System Internals has a much more comprehensive process explorer.

This ^^ Sysinternals will get to the bottom of what's going on very quickly if it's SW related.

I just checked the sys internals site, there look to be around 40 utilities; do I need a specific one?

[WinstonWolf]

mikef said:

WinstonWolf said:

Martin4x4 said:

Try System Internals has a much more comprehensive process explorer.

This ^^ Sysinternals will get to the bottom of what's going on very quickly if it's SW related.

I just checked the sys internals site, there look to be around 40 utilities; do I need a specific one?

Download the whole suite, the one that's of most use for now is Process Explorer. It's let you drill down into the various svchost processes as well as everything else.

[mikef]

Thanks - looking at that now. I guess I need to do that when the system next slows itself down

[WinstonWolf]

Yup, could be a scheduled task, could be anything. Process Explorer gives you good visibility into what's going on. Might be useful to baseline it so you know what's 'normal' before it starts playing up.

[mikef]

Good thinking, thanks. I'll boot without starting usual services, baseline that (any better way than just saving the .text file?), boot with known services and do the same

[Zad]

I think there is not much point investigating until it actually slows down. I'm surprised the core and motherboard temperatures got as high as 100C though, especially having an upgraded heatsink fan and case fans. On the up-side, those sorts of temperatures would normally cause a hardware fault to show itself.

[mikef]

Zad said:

I'm surprised the core and motherboard temperatures got as high as 100C though

95C max core temperature against a Tjunction Max of 103. I don't think I'll be doing any protein folding though, unless I can move to a cooler room. The most I see in normal use is in the 50sC