srudb.dat using 100% disk

Question

The process below has been hogging disk resources on my laptop for some time, often using 70% of disk or above by itself, typically 6+ MB/s. CPU and memory usage seem normal.

Service Host: Local Service (No Network) (2)

   -Diagnostic Policy Service

   -Base Filtering Engine

(Windows firewall appears under the process too, but I stopped the service and the problem continued.)

Under the resource monitor, "c:\windows\system32\sru\srudb.dat" is shown to be constantly writing to the disk 6+ megabytes per second.

Disk reading = 0

I/O priority = normal

Response time = 1ms (presumably because writing is continuous)

Is there a way to fix this problem? I have googled it but it seems that most of the entries are due to long response times and system freezing, as opposed to excess disk writing.

Thanks for reading.

Computer info:

Windows 8.1 Home

Dell Inspiron 5520

Intel i7, 4 x 2.2GHz

6 gig RAM

1TB hard disk (698GB free)

Answer 1

Richard

DO you have any idea what srudb.dat is for?  16,000,000 of 19,000,000 disk read/writes weree caused buy it?  I cannot find any English language info on it.

I might consider renaming it to srudb.bak so it cannot load and see what complains.

Answer 2

Not sure of the purpose. I have looked but the only information I have found it related to system errors.

Since my last message I disabled the Diagnostic Policy Service (DPS), which was one of the services of the svchost process that was using most of the disk, and that seems to have fixed the issue. Perhaps the SRUDB.dat file contributes towards the DPS?

Thanks for the replies!

Richard

Answer 3

In order to diagnose your problem we need to run Windows performance toolkit the instructions for which can be found in this wiki

If you have any questions feel free to ask

Answer 4

Richard

After seeing this 3 more times it seems the common thread between them is corrupt sectors on the HD.  After marking the sectors as bad and rebuilding the DAT file the problem has resolved itself in 2 other cases.

Answer 5

Richard

The bigger of the 2 traces was active for only 3.2 seconds and I zoomed in to the detail.  The HD was not maxed out at 100% except for brief (under 0.1 seconds) intervals when svchost.exe was writing to disk.

I did see srudb.dat but it did not appear to be delaying the UI much if at all.  I cannot find any English info on it so just to rule it out please run malwarebytes and upload a longer trace.

Please download the free version of Malwarebytes.

Update it immediately.

Do a full system scan

Let us know the results at the end.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products