Pagefile.sys activity cause 100% disc utilisation

Question

Pagefile.sys activity cause 100% disc utilisation

Anonymous

I have noticed that my machine as frequent, but short lived periods of 100% disk utilisation by the "system" process.

I have used xperf and PerfMon tools to analyse what is going with my system. I have Windows 8.1, but had this same issue on Windows 8. I upgraded hoping this had been resolved.

What I have found is that, in my case, the disk utilisation is caused by heavy reads/writes of pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys. Changing the size of the pagefile to something static, changing it to the suggestions of 1x RAM for minimum and 2x RAM for max. They just effect how long the utilisation runs for when the thrashing occurs. Disabling Windows Defender, Superfetch or Windows Search does NOT stop the IO thrashing of the above mentioned 2 files. There is a slight reduction in disk utilisation over all, but the 100% spikes still occur.

Other than turning off Virtual Memory completely, nothing stops the utilisation spikes. I only have a single SSD in my notebook so I can't set the pagefile to another disk. I have a USB drive at home, so I will see if I can set it to that as an experiment.

I have run out of ideas now. There appears to be something inefficient in the way Windows 8/8.1 is reading and writing to the disk for swapspace and pagefiles. I don't know if this is because the drivers are not correct. I have tried the Windows standard driver and the Intel RST driver. Both have the 100% utilisation spikes.

Does anyone know what else I can try?

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4 answers

Answer 1

Anonymous

Hi,

You might be right.. A lot of SSD's have a method of "Resetting". You might investigate if this is available for your drive... and possibly a Firmware update...

I couldn't find much info for it...

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Answer 2

Anonymous

Actually, I think I found what the issue has to be. Look at the benchmark for the drive. Write speed is dismal. I wonder if this drive is about to die...

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Answer 3

Hi slance310,

My SSD is a SanDisk U100 128GB.

I have tested the drive for read/write speeds and all benchmarks come in expected ranges. What I don't understand is why are there so many writes and reads to C:\pagefile.sys even when nothing is happening. I have had Chrome and Resource monitor open, with nothing else, disable start-up services and I'll still get the random spikes and it's always pagefile.sys or swapfile.sys.

If I turn off Virtual Memory, it's all smooth sailing, until I run low on memory and have to stop what I'm doing.

Thing is, I had this issue happening with Windows 8. Killed the partition, clean installed Windows 8, upgraded to Windows 8.1 and it still happening. So I don't think it's because of anything nasty running in the background. xperf also only indicated that pagefile and swapfile where hammering IO.

Anything else I can provide? Could it be a driver issue manhandling Disk I/O?

Thanks!

Answer 4

Hi,

I don't have a solution for you, but wanted to note that I don't have a similar issue on my Desktop machine that is running a SSD...

There isn't really anything that should be using PageFile and SwapFile during normal operation unless you are running a very memory intensive process...

Even then, I wouldn't think that would use the SwapFile. That's primarily used for the Fast Startup feature at Shutdown...

Is it possible that this might be caused by the SSD's internal features like TRIM?

If I were to make a guess, I might suspect a Firmware issue in the SSD.

What model SSD is this ?

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Pagefile.sys activity cause 100% disc utilisation

4 answers