Odd, but effective, Windows Fix

http://a1.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-fix-for-windows-8-freezes-and.html

by EwanG • 14 years ago

20 24 14 years ago

a1.blogspot.com

cabirum• 14 years ago

Default Power Options setting is to turn off hard drives after 20 mins. Any r/w operation would require it to spin up which can take up to 30 secs, during this time the app behind that becomes unresponsive. Seems like the possible cause for me.

Anyway, disabling swapfile is not a fix, merely a way to hide symptoms of the problem.

coffeeaddicted3• 14 years ago

Yeah, took around 5 seconds here to wake up when I right-clicked in VS because of that. My swapfile is on a second HD which is not running much otherwise, and this also caused me regular freezes. My workaround was increasing the time to 60 minutes, which probably uses up some more power, but seems to be enough to avoid running into this problem in my usual workflow.

EwanG3• 14 years ago

FWIW, but all my drives are set to timeoff "Never" because I would rather pay a little more in electricity. Per one of the other comments, even if the drive is spinning, Windows checks the page file first to see if it already "knows" about the file. In many cases that check takes longer than a modern drive would take to seek-find-copy. IMNSHO, Page files are an old solution that need to be rethought given the newer hardware that many of us are using.

masenf• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why the pagefile would even be in use if your system operates with 4.5Gb free memory...

davux• 14 years ago

From the comments:

http://serverfault.com/a/23684

codinghorror2• 14 years ago

I hope people read that link, because this "we don't need no steenking pagefile!" meme comes up like clockwork every year and it's wrong every time...

donpdonp• 14 years ago

The title is disturbingly close to "Fix windows with this one weird trick."

A couple years ago I googled for "windows vista thrashing" and found a number of good guides that say what services to turn off and it was a huge performance boost.

EwanG3• 14 years ago

Probably because I saw a posting on here some time ago (sorry I can't pull the link off the top of my head) that explained why you saw "Odd" and "Weird" on so many ads on the Weather Channel site. Given that this is my highest voted HN submission in some time, and my highest single day visit to my blog, I'd say that there was probably some science behind this :-)

reneherse• 14 years ago

You just made me realize how much my "web annoyance" factor has actually gone down since I installed ad blockers and don't have to see those "with one weird trick" ads anymore. They're really the worst of the worst IMO. (But I am glad that you were able to legitimately repurpose the phrase in this case.)

I'd love to see the article you mentioned, but I shudder to think of the search results were I to go looking for it. ;)

rosstafarian3• 14 years ago

Mark Russinovitch did a great talk on how windows uses memory. I highly recommend checking it out if you're curious about this sort of thing

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL... Mysteries of Memory Management Revealed,with Mark Russinovich (Part 1 of 2)

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL... part 2

JBiserkov2• 14 years ago

I've disabled the page file on all my systems since I had more than 128 MB RAM. Increased performance every time. System has never crashed, individual programs rarely do since Windows is pretty good about warning you. A funny thing I noticed on my first XP box (256 mb): whenever I ran out of memory, Winamp got killed. Don't know why, but it was no coincidence - I've reproduced this a hundred times, showing it to friends, etc. there was no memory leak in Winamp - it's memory usage was constant. Maybe the system figured out it had no files open in write mode, so killing it would be harmless. Anyone heard of something like this or have another explanation? Windows killed user processes in reversed alphabetical order?! :)

tl;dr; determine peak usage, install twice the memory, DISABLE virtual memory, profit!

codinghorror2• 14 years ago

this is, and has always been, a bad idea per http://serverfault.com/a/23684

keeperofdakeys2• 14 years ago

Of course this always depends on your use-case. If you have more ram then you use (say double), you would never notice the effect of this behaviour. I have a linux laptop with 8GB of ram, and no swap, since the SSD is rather small. It takes a few days to fill up the ram (with file buffers). The programs I run will never approach the amount of ram I have, so I am fine with no swap.

Odd, but effective, Windows Fix

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