Windows 10 Constant disk activity after powerup, lasts 90 minutes

[Nomad of Norad]

Okay, I am having an issue that has been plaguing me for years, and that I have been having since I was back on Windows 7, and which didn't go away when I moved to windows 10, which I did ages ago.

I turn my machine on, and certain foreground tasks tend to be a little sluggish, and I look over at the machine and I'm seeing the disk-activity light on 100% of the time. I also know if I try to do certain bigger, more resources-required tasks, they'll get stomped all over. For instance, if I try to log into Second Life or one of the other, opensim virtual worlds, it will take way longer than normal to connect... up to 5 minutes of Connecting to World... and then often fail, or I'll get in and its proceeded to EAT all the accumulated Notices that had been sent since I last logged in, so I never see them.

This is hugely frustrating, because it forces me to turn my machine in an hour and a half before any important events, and then walk away and let it do its thing. I've tried looking at the stats in Task Manager and the like, trying to figure out what task or tasks might be gobbling up that magnitude of resources.... but nothing seems to be taking up anything beyond a normal, mundane, small percent of disk activity or processor activity.

Any idea where I should be looking? This is getting gigantically OLD.

 

[Neemobeer]

For starters please provide the make and model of the computer and specs (CPU, memory and hard drive configuration)

A couple of items that generally will cause this behavior

• Memory exhaustion
• Broken windows update mechanism

Download Process Explorer
and right click on the column headers and add the IO Read and IO write columns and sort by them and you should be able to ID the process. You can also look for high memory usage. If you're using 90+% of your memory then this will cause page fault thrashing (lots of data being swapped between memory and disk constantly)

 

[Nomad of Norad]

machine specs:

CPU: AMD FX-8320 Eight-Core Processor (3500.08 MHz)
Memory: 32718 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 14393)
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/PCIe/SSE2 made by Zotac

edit: Okay, I have unpacked the zip of that ProcessExplorer thingy and have launched procexp.exe in it. When I rightclick on the top of the columns area, and look all around in the Select Columns pane invoked from there, I don't see anything named IO Read or IO Write under any of the tabs in there. Am I missing something? Should I launch procexp64.exe instead?

 

[Neemobeer]

They are here.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

One thing that I'd do is install CCleaner if you haven't already and go to the Tools / Startup Tab.

I only have 6 of the 27 things listed there turned on so that they load at startup.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but CCleaner is easy because you can check and uncheck the items without risk.

The things I have turned on are.

RocketDock
Launch L Core (my mouse software)
Security Health (Microsoft)
Steam
Adobe Gamma.lnk

Everything else is disabled.

What you need to run you will have to figure out.

Windows 10 is better in this respect than Windows 7 which loaded lots of things at startup.

All of the things that aren't set to load will still load if you start them when needed.

Are you running some kind of virus protection that scans everytime you boot your computer?

I've had software that did that and it could keep the disk running for a long time.

I use Malwarebytes it seems to have very little hit on performance.

Just running CCleaner every day makes a difference on my computer.

I use Defraggler to defrag my conventional drives (not my SSD) it is easy to use because it has the option to just defrag files and not do the whole drive every time so it's pretty quick.

I run it at least once a week or after any software update, i.e. games etc.

Also, try running SFC /scannow from the command prompt.

It may find something that's slowing things down.

Mike

 

[nmsuk]

May I add getting the latest windows 10 update would help to. Use the windows media creation tool to upgrade if windows updates aren't offering it to you.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Well, here's what I'm getting (with Task Manager open next to it for comparison):

 

[Neemobeer]

I would remove real player. That looks like your culprit.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Hmmmm... after a couple of hours (in recent days its gotten to longer than 90 minutes), all that disk activity finally stopped, but it still looks like this:

 

[nmsuk]

It's realplayer scraping the disk for media files.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Okay, if RealPLayer is showing the same amount of read and write activity after the big constant-disk-light activity as during.... is it still the likely choice for what's stomping all over my early on activities, or should I be looking elsewhere? oO

 

[Neemobeer]

It's a total count it's not a "how many at a given time". In other words that number will never go down. 100 million reads is quite a lot unless the computer has been running for weeks or longer.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Ah, okay.... gotcha. I was reading that number as "This many have happened in this current window of X-number of moments" and that that number would go down as I transitioned into a new "x-number of moments" window.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Well, I thought I had the issue nailed... and didn't seem to be having the trouble (as bad) as before, but it seems to be back with a vengeance. I actually went so far today as to uninstall RealPlayer and then reboot (I had it disabled before, and it was still showing as disabled), and I'm still seeing the disk light on 100% of the time now. It has been about 4 hours since I restarted the machine from that. The disk light is still on solidly the whole time.

Attached is my current Process Explorer result.

 

[Neemobeer]

Well the bitcoin-qt, runtimebroker and opera processes at the time would be your culprits. If you hover over the runtimebroker it should tell you which package it is associated with. I would assume you are doing some bitcoin mining? As per documentation this process has to do some kind of sync at first launch and it's both CPU and disk IO intensive. A web browser shouldn't be that intensive normally. it depends what you're doing.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Well, I had a LOT of tabs open in Opera browser, and was drag-and-dropping to shortcut those wholesale into various folders... As for the bitcoin app, no I'm not mining for bitcoin, its simply my bitcoin wallet. I did update it a couple of weeks ago after the previous version started complaining about some issue with the blockchain... and upon looking up what the error was, realized I was using an old version of the wallet app and they'd made some under the hood changes to how the blockchain was handled. It was maybe a day or two after this update that I noticed I was having constant disk activity again.

edit: Attached is what Process Explorer looks like now.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Okay, now sometime within the past hour, the nonstop disk activity stopped, something like 6 or 7 hours after it started.

 

[Neemobeer]

Well it's that bitcoin app causing most of your IO.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Well, lots of IO makes sense, the program keeps itself in sync with the current state of the blockchain at all times, but if its generating gobs and gobs of disk activity in the process.... then I don't remember it doing remotely anything like that in the previous version of the app. oO

 

[Neemobeer]

It's stated on their website that it's heavy on both CPU and disk io when it syncs