How can I find out what's thrashing my hard drive in XP?

Question

This is a programming question in the sense that I'm experiencing a hardware issue which is keeping me from being able to develop effectively...

Anyway, my PC is running insanely slow, but it doesn't appear to be a memory consumption issue or a CPU issue - no programs are running away with too much of either. But something is thrashing my hard drive - the hard drive light just stays on nearly solidly, barely flickering at all, and it never stops.

In Vista there would be a likely culprit (superfetch) as well as intrinsic tools to see what the issue is (resource manager, I believe) - but I'm running Windows XP.

Is there a way, through a utility or programmatically - to see what it is that's murdering my hard drive performance in Windows XP?

Answer 1

For a really quick test you can check Task manager, choose columns and choose IO stuff as well as Page Faults. The process that has lots of activity may be your culprit.

Answer 2

Diskmon or Filemon. They will tell you precisely what disk activity is happening by which processes.

Answer 3

Good chance your PC is sending out buckets of spam or acting as a porn fileserver. use a sniffer to check your network traffic and see what it looks like.

Regardless of the problem the answer is probably to re-install windows.

Answer 4

In the task manager, there is a performance tab. There it shows 'commit charge'. If 'peak' under 'commit charge' is consistently higher (by 25% or more) than your physical memory, it could be that you just don't have enough RAM for what you are running.

Especially if this is true immediately after boot. Also assuming that you don't have any unwanted guests running.

Answer 5

Load Process Explorer and press CTRL-I to load the System Information window. Mouse over the I/O Bytes graph and it'll tell you the process reading / writing the most.

Alternatively have a look at PerfMon (start, run, perfmon) which will let you show read / writes on a per process basis and is built into Windows 2000 onwards.

For further reading about general troubleshooting you might be interested in this Mark Russinovich video in which he talks about diagnosing unexplained technical problems. Highly recommended viewing.

Answer 6

I'd suggest some of the excellent SysInternals utilities.

In particular:

DiskMon This utility captures all hard disk activity or acts like a software disk activity light in your system tray.

FileMon This monitoring tool lets you see all file system activity in real-time.

Process Monitor Monitor file system, Registry, process, thread and DLL activity in real-time.

Process Explorer Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This uniquely powerful utility will even show you who owns each process.

Answer 7

ProcessMonitor is also a good tool for tracking drive usage on a per-process basis. It is by far my favorite tool for every kind of "which program is misbehaving" diagnostics.

Answer 8

Format and start fresh.

After various hardware problems causing many crashes over two years, my Windows XP machine was facing this same issue. I had IT re-image it. I can't believe how fast it runs now.

Answer 9

Consider the following:

1) Defragmentation. If your drive hasn't been defragged in years it could be so fragged up that fetching a simple file is a hard drive intensive operation.

2) Failing Hard Drive. If your drive is older than a year, check the warranty on it. Drives with only 1 year warranty are usually trouble. A nearly solid HD LED is also a sign of a failing drive. (Check your HD manufacturer's Diagnostic tool)

3) Rootkit Revealer. There could be a rootkit with a hidden process running in the background.

4) Virtual Memory. Check your page file settings. Having too small a page file sometimes causes thrashing.

Answer 10

My guess is you're running Windows Desktop Search and a gigantic source tree, probably one managed under a revision control system, found its way into WDS's path and it's triggering worst case performance.

Answer 11

The first thing I do is to look at the task list and see how much CPU and RAM are free. You may simply need more RAM.