Extreme laptop slowdown (solved)

[SpyderTracks]

This is mine with the same

Windows will dynamically adjust what it provides depending on how much it has available.

You're system is very short on RAM and performance will be throttled because of it.

You need a minimum of 8Gb RAM for any modern windows PC running win 10.

 

[seafiant]

I did notice something very interesting when comparing yours to mine and did a quick Google. Turns out there is a known glitch with Windows 10 and it not releasing "Standby memory" to become free memory and forcing a write to HDD instead as temp memory. It could be I have that glitch as my standby memory amount is huge in comparison.

An interesting reddit topic on the subject really got my attention with this quote:
"EDIT3: If you want to fill up your Standby Memory Cache quite quickly, just download a large file (Titanfall 2 works for me). Mine is full once it hits around 9gb (16gb RAM) and you can see this in Task Manager under Performance > Memory > Cached "

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8ks8hm

3 Ways to Fix Standby Memory Issues on Windows 10

If your computer is slower than usual. one of the most common causes is related to Standby Memory problems. Here's how to fix it.

windowsreport.com

Issue is if that's the problem then it means having to manually flush the RAM every time and can't be fixed with a simple change of Windows settings. Will report back what happens asap.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I did notice something very interesting when comparing yours to mine and did a quick Google. Turns out there is a known glitch with Windows 10 and it not releasing "Standby memory" to become free memory and forcing a write to HDD instead as temp memory. It could be I have that glitch as my standby memory amount is huge in comparison.

An interesting reddit topic on the subject really got my attention with this quote:
"EDIT3: If you want to fill up your Standby Memory Cache quite quickly, just download a large file (Titanfall 2 works for me). Mine is full once it hits around 9gb (16gb RAM) and you can see this in Task Manager under Performance > Memory > Cached "

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8ks8hm

3 Ways to Fix Standby Memory Issues on Windows 10

If your computer is slower than usual. one of the most common causes is related to Standby Memory problems. Here's how to fix it.

windowsreport.com

Issue is if that's the problem then it means having to manually flush the RAM every time and can't be fixed with a simple change of Windows settings. Will report back what happens asap.

That's very interesting, I wasn't aware of that, certainly worth trying.

 

[SpyderTracks]

This is my system just in windows:

 

[seafiant]

Ouch. Can't imagine why your windows uses so much more than mine.

I just ran the Standby Memory cleaner and it made a huge difference instantly. Even with Windows reclaiming some for a few minutes I have almost 1GB of completely free RAM even with VLC, Chrome etc still running. Going to close everything, try a download and see what happens monitoring the RAM situation.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I just ran the Standby Memory cleaner and it made a huge difference instantly. Even with Windows reclaiming some for a few minutes I have almost 1GB of completely free RAM even with VLC, Chrome etc still running. Going to close everything, try a download and see what happens monitoring the RAM situation.

Whether or not that frees up RAM, you're system is still starved of RAM, so it will allocate what it can to RAM and the rest will be written out in Hard Faults to the disk drive.

 

[acolwill]

My other half has a Lenovo Ideapad 120s, it's a Pentium N4200 with 4GB ram and a 64GB EMMC. Never has it had the kind of issues your machine has encountered... Arguably it's got a superior processor and storage however it's still got 4GB RAM.

Screenies taken whilst checking for Windows updates.

 

[acolwill]

Showed this article to a colleague at my old place of work as he believed that running a "memory defragmenter" on the servers we managed was a great idea.

Why Memory Optimizers and RAM Boosters Are Worse Than Useless

Many companies want to sell you "memory optimizers," often as part of "PC optimization" programs.

www.howtogeek.com

 

[seafiant]

I remember those old Memory Optimiser programs from when they were put on the cover CD's of magazines. Like those "make your dial-up internet 200% faster!" programs. Even though we knew they were a load of rubbish we still tried them to get an extra 1kbps. So funny seeing them again it's like a Y2K checker. I think this Windows 10 issue makes things a bit more interesting, the Standby RAM isn't used as we know it, and it isn't in progress writes, by Windows own explanation it's old cached data not in use and has turned part of the ram into a recycle bin of sorts. If it is a Windows 10 glitch that it's not returning to free RAM as many have found (one Windows help article has over 300 "I have this" replies) then I'm hoping I'm one of them since it will mean the solution is very simple.


I haven't tried downloading yet. I didn't like the idea of having to manually check the RAM and clean it by hand at every slowdown. So I combined a few sources and came across this video for a clean command/task scheduler combination.

I modified it slightly and made it so it'll run every 15 seconds from midnight. Already the visible boost in free ram is incredible. Still have way too many Chrome tabs open (don't we all!) and VLC so the situation will be even better with them closed. Having 1.2GB completely empty feels a lot better than having standby ram taking almost everything. Screen below. Will update after I've tried some of the usual troublesome downloads tomorrow.

And here's Windows with nothing running (no Chrome or VLC) it's even better. The cleaner is running every 30 seconds now and it seems more than enough. The download test should be interesting:

 

[acolwill]

For the sake of £35, I wouldn't be running a background task to purge cached ram every 30 seconds... just my personal opinion...
I've just run a test on my rig here; unsuspended all of my chrome tabs

Cached pool doubled.. Although not a real world test as I arguably have "too much" RAM.

 

[seafiant]

That much ram is just showing off

Did one test and it looked like it worked, the Standby ram shot up quickly increasing from the moment the download started and the time it took to fill up the free ram matched perfectly with when my problems would start. Thankfully the auto task wiped it out quickly and all seemed great. However as soon as I went for the Steam test the problem is just as bad as before. I had my hand ready for screenshots this time and here's some "as it happened" shots for data. Interesting bit is one screenshot actually corrupted, strange so I included it just so you could see something odd.

Start of the problems the download stops completely and the system begins to freeze. Mouse cursor still works but nothing reacts quickly. VLC video playing stops, same with audio.

Disc info as it was happening:

Second screenshot of disc info page corrupted. At the time the number was bouncing up into the 1000s of milliseconds with large data transfer rates.

View attachment Screenshot (24).png
And this is what happens with the transfer (including disc usage rates.) At this point I normally hit the stop button, wait a minute
and then the system returns to normal.

So it's just really strange. The system is responding perfectly now no restart required. All I did was stop downloading. The screenshot
confirms that RAM never reaches anywhere near full (59%), processor only 9% yet the drive hits 100% with data rates all over the place.

 

[acolwill]

Purging the cached memory will inevitably dump it to page file, and given your hard disk is a major bottleneck then it's bound to hang the machine.

I've just done the same thing you've done on my machine:
Except this is a 17GB update.

Disk active time spiked as it was starting the download, then it normalised.
Only thing that I can see that's happening is the twitch stream I'm watching keeps pausing because Steam has sucked all my bandwidth.

Cached memory has jumped..

But again, I've got *loads* of spare resources...
I still belive there's nothing funamentally wrong, your system is just starved of resources and bottlenecked by a low performance mechanical disk.

 

[acolwill]

Just had a thought... If you want to stop windows from caching disk writes, turn it off.

You won't need to use that cache purge task...

p.s. I have write-cache disabled because I'm powered through a UPS

 

[ubuysa]

With such little RAM, it will be maxxing out and then have to write to the hard drive to make up for it.

You can see this by the hard faults on task manager on the RAM page.

That will cause a significant slow down.

This is entirely possible, if you are paging then performance will drop through the floor.

This is why you need accurate data, you need to know which processes are using the drive and how deep the queue length gets, and only the performance monitor can give you that.

If you want a quick and dirty method of seeing whether you're paging then start the resource monitor and watch the Hard Faults/sec counter on the header field of the Memory section. If that is consistently above 0 for long periods then you're paging and that's your problem.

Purging the cached memory will inevitably dump it to page file, and given your hard disk is a major bottleneck then it's bound to hang the machine.

It won't be paging the cached data, but if that fills RAM it will be paging other, less recently used, pages.

It might not be paging however, but to go further you need data otherwise we're all just guessing......

 

[seafiant]

I was looking at that tab in device manager before. Being on a roaming laptop using battery and wall it's not on a UPS so I didn't want to mess with that setting. I do wonder though but when it comes to laptops I'm not sure if its nature of having a battery inside that and windows auto shutting down at low power doesn't act as a safeguard to avoid data damage since the power never just suddenly cuts off.

For the request for more info, I'm going to try a Steam download again tonight since it's a sure fire way to make it hang and post a lot more in-depth screens using Process Explorer and maybe Performance Monitor (showing HDD usage by file) as the problem is happening to see if that helps. An example for the Process Explorer data is below, if you know the program and want a custom data column added just let me know which ones.

This is the system fresh on a new startup working as normal for comparison after moving a few GB of data to a USB.
I've arranged the data by CPU cycles since start-up.

 

[Oussebon]

Have you considered trying the laptop with Linux?

 

[ubuysa]

3 Ways to Fix Standby Memory Issues on Windows 10

If your computer is slower than usual. one of the most common causes is related to Standby Memory problems. Here's how to fix it.

windowsreport.com

I'm sorry but IMO that article on Standby Memory is completely and totally wrong. Standby memory is not an accident, and it's certainly not the result of Windows 'forgetting' to free up memory that's it's used for file cache. BTW Standby Memory is not just file caches either, it's any memory that's been freed by the owning process. The logic behind Standby Memory is that it makes no sense to erase a page of RAM just because a process has freed it, or because the cached file has been closed. If the process wants that data later, or if the file is read again the data can be provided immediately. Standby memory is however, available to be reused for any other purpose at any time, it is in effect free RAM.

Suggesting in that article that the user can manage memory better that Windows with tools like RAMMAP is frankly a joke and shows a complete lack of understanding of Windows memory management. Standby memory is a good thing, actually it's a GREAT thing, because it contains pages that might be useful again later and which (if so) will avoid a disk I/O or the overhead of a new page allocation and a page-in. Yet at the same time it's RAM that can be immediately allocated to another process without having to do a page-out.

I simply don't believe the assertion that Standby memory causes problems as suggested by this article because it is, in essence, free memory!

 

[ubuysa]

I was looking at that tab in device manager before. Being on a roaming laptop using battery and wall it's not on a UPS so I didn't want to mess with that setting. I do wonder though but when it comes to laptops I'm not sure if its nature of having a battery inside that and windows auto shutting down at low power doesn't act as a safeguard to avoid data damage since the power never just suddenly cuts off.

For the request for more info, I'm going to try a Steam download again tonight since it's a sure fire way to make it hang and post a lot more in-depth screens using Process Explorer and maybe Performance Monitor (showing HDD usage by file) as the problem is happening to see if that helps. An example for the Process Explorer data is below, if you know the program and want a custom data column added just let me know which ones.

This is the system fresh on a new startup working as normal for comparison after moving a few GB of data to a USB.
I've arranged the data by CPU cycles since start-up.

View attachment 13364

There is nothing at all in that output that is of concern. You know I assume that you have to be extremely careful how you user process explorer? You can modify so many things via procexp that will seriously degrade or even crash your system. It is a useful tool but please be very careful how you use it.

 

[seafiant]

Have you considered trying the laptop with Linux?

Considered but it's really not possible. Windows really is essential in every way for the daily tasks I do.

I just forced the error now (no point in waiting) and took screenshots in real time of every possible open window for data. Please forgive the number of screens. I thought too much information was better than too little. This progress goes from the start and things running normally to the end and problem in full effect. (Posted in timeline order)

Below screen is when the problem just starts showing the cutoff, every screen after is during the problem.

Continued...

 

[seafiant]

(Part 2) - Please forgive number of screens. I read the comments about free ram and having heard a second opinion I tend to agree. It also didn't fix my issue so disabling the auto task can only be a good thing.

Continued...(final screens in next)