[Virtualacorn-list] VRPC being sluggish.

[Alan Adams]

In message <933051C6887540BE9F2443761324F71B at philipsdesktop>
          "T.O.M.S." <admin at toms12.plus.com> wrote:


> Hello Folks

> In message <6d1676e953.pnyoung at pnyoung.ormail.co.uk>
>           Peter Young <pnyoung at ormail.co.uk> wrote:

>> I've found a lot of time that the response to
>> the keyboard is very slow, and sometimes a relatively high
>> proportion of keystrokes don't get registered. There's also
>> sometimes a sluggish response to menu clicks.

> We fully agree with Mike H's follow-up.

> A quickly-done check is whether the hard disc activity LED is busy, as
> that may well indicate that lots of processor power is being used up,
> maybe elsewhere.

> Try the dreaded <Ctrl-Alt-Delete>, select the Processes tab and see
> what the bottom line ('System Idle Process'I is saying. If anything
> less than around 98% in the CPU column, have a shufti further up the
> column (including VirtualRPC) to see where the oomph is going. It
> might well pin down the culprit, e.g. your anti-virus prog.

> HTH,

Make sure VRPC isn't set to use excessive memory. Using more than half 
the physical memory available to Windows will hurt performance. In 
addition the startup memory test will take longer.

You can get a lot more information from the task manager.
If you click on a column heading it sorts the display by that column, 
making it east to see, for example, the top CPU processes.

With the processes tab selected, use the View menu, and Select 
Columns.

I generally select I/O reads, I/O writes, Page Fault Delta.

If something, e.g. virus scan or Windows Update is doing a lot of disc 
activity it may not show up in CPU, but it will show up in I/O reads 
and writes.

Page fault DELTA shows how often the system needs to reclaim memory 
from one process to give to another. It's an indication that the 
virtual memory system is using the disc. Figures much greater than 10 
can be significant, and greater than 100 indicate a lack of physical 
memory for the current workload. Adding memory is a fairly cheap way 
to improve performance in such situations. (Memory access is typically 
100 times faster than disc, so once virtual memory is active 
performance suffers. If the pagefile gets fragmented, it's even 
worse.)

At the bottom of the processes screen it shows % physical memory used. 
If that is over 75% you need to get more memory, or reduce demand.

Don't forget to defragment the disc. Over time files, especially the 
pagefile, get fragmented, and it means instead of one disc request for 
a piece of data, multiple requests are needed. On the disc, click 
Properties, then Tools, and then Defragment now.

When I install Windows, I usually try to create a separate partition 
for the pagefile, which prevents it from becoming fragmented, since it 
isn't allocating space that has been released by other file activity.

> Alex Hamilton
> pp T.O.M.S.


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-- 
Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire
alan at adamshome.org.uk
http://www.nckc.org.uk/