100% Disk Usage
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@darkstar9386 said in 100% Disk Usage:
@BoneTone @Pathduck So I did run both the programs, and from what I've seen, its still only when Vivaldi is opening up/trying to load webpage.
Resource Monitor - Vivaldi Running
Yup, Vivaldi is just writing to the logs, at least that is all I can see in the screenshot. It'll help if you do the step I mentioned and check the box next to the processes that are at the top of the Total data rate sort. This limits the Disk Activity section to files being accessed by the selected process(es) only. Then you can raise the bar between Disk Activity and Processes sections to give more space.
None of the processes are accessing (reading or writing) a lot of data, tens of kilobytes per second, that's nothing. What the Highest Active Time is measuring is the time the disc is not idle and is busy serving requests. When you see high percentages like this, you're almost certainly looking at a problem with the disc, and its becoming a bottleneck to performance. This can be due to a highly fragmented drive, which can be resolved by defragmenting it. It could be due to thrashing, and seeing your page file in the that is definitely a suspect. To address that you'll need to tweak your virtual memory settings.
Also, next time you take a screenshot of this app, adjust the column sizes to include all the columns in the image if you can. I/O Priority and Response Time are missing and can be helpful. But my first guess here is that you've got some thrashing going on with the page file, second guess is a fragmented disk.
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Oh, I also noticed that WerFault.exe is in the top 3, the 3 that are most significant in terms of total data rate. You could try disabling the Windows Error Reporting service to see if that helps at all.
Looking at the numbers again... I just saw the page file at the top, but you gotta check the boxes on those 3 processes, then do another sort on the total column and screenshot that, then do a sort on the I/O column and screenshot that. The Disk Activity list you have shown there doesn't show what files System is accessing that would add up to 45K, the list is too crowded.
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@Ayespy
Windows 10 1909
Intel i5-6200U
8 GB ramWith security software, its only AVG
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@darkstar9386
Your system resources should be more than adequate.It is possible for AVG to be intercepting and examining every operation that Vivaldi attempts, before permitting it. It has been known in the past that AVG has failed to "trust" Vivaldi, and has either blocked it, slowed it, or consumed system resources monitoring it, every time Vivaldi is opened.
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@Ayespy said in 100% Disk Usage:
@darkstar9386
It is possible for AVG to be intercepting and examining every operation that Vivaldi attempts, before permitting it. It has been known in the past that AVG has failed to "trust" Vivaldi, and has either blocked it, slowed it, or consumed system resources monitoring it, every time Vivaldi is opened.Except I don't see any avg related process in the resource monitor hitting the drive. The 3 main culprits are System, vivaldi.exe, and WerFault.exe, in that order, Plus Memory Compression hitting the page file.
However, there is very little data throughput for any process, which suggests that the the reason for the high access time is lots of little files. With the page file being one of the files being accessed, and only 8 GB of physical RAM, it's quite possible the virtual memory is thrashing.
@darkstar9386 did you see my previous posts? Think you can follow up with that investigation? It may narrow down the issue. Are you experiencing any problems, or is it just that you noticed this one meter was maxed? If you aren't having any performance problems, I'd be inclined to think this is a non-issue. If it's Vivaldi, it's just writing to the log and it'll finish in a little bit. If your virtual memory is thrashing, you'll want to change its settings to address that, and possibly add some more physical RAM. So, in addition to what I wrote above, it would be good to know what your virtual memory settings are.
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@darkstar9386 , I can see that the Windows error report is working, (WerFault.exe) this can precisely cause some system errors, if it is working.
https://rizonjet.com/fix-werfault-exe-application-error-in-windows-10/
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@BoneTone sorry I didn't reply earlier, just busy with work, but I did take the screenshots with the I/O Priority, Response time, I/O Read Bytes, and Virtual Memory.
It's only when opening Vivaldi that Disk becomes 100% and essentially only when Vivaldi is running, no other program (besides VMWare when I use it) have this problem. When I leave it to run for a bit Disk Usage does go down, but goes back to 100% when I try to go to another page.
Changing the physical RAM might be a bit difficult since its a laptop.
@Catweazle I did try a few of the methods, they were nice to know about, didn't know about them, but sadly did not solve the problem.
ResourceMonitor - SortByRead_ResponseTime
ResourceMonitor - SortByRead_I/O Priority
ProcExp - SortBy I/O ReadBytes
Virtual Memory Settings
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@darkstar9386 As this does not happen on other systems at this time, with current versions, that argues strongly for the problem being local to you. I still lean toward the idea that something on your system is actively interfering with Vivaldi, and not other programs. This would not be the first time that software aimed at system security singled out Vivaldi (because it's new, unfamiliar, "not trusted") and interfered with it.
If you had a badly fragmented disk (and Win10 is supposed to prevent that these days) it should affect other programs with excessive swapping and thrashing as well, not just Vivaldi. Vivaldi, as it is written, does not NEED excessive disk access. It just doesn't. Therefore, other factors need to be explored.
I wonder how long you have been using Vivaldi - over a year? Some problems from a long time ago could have been brought forward if you just kept updating an old profile over and over and never corrected them.
For fun, why not refresh your profile and see if anything improves. It can't hurt, and may help.
Edit: I'm sitting here flipping from tab to tab, opening and closing pages, following links, etc. and can't get my main disk access to exceed 1%. 1%. That is all Vivaldi needs.
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@Ayespy yeah, I tried looking it up from other forum posts, they didn't seem too similar as whats happening with my problem.
I've been using Vivaldi for around over a year, and haven't had this problem, and I do enjoy using it. I'll give the profile refresh an attempt and see how that works.
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@Ayespy so I did try the refresh profile method, and it has given me way better results. Specifically, Disk usage has looks like something that would be normal to see, a bit highish at startup but goes back to around 1%ish.
It possibly might have been the extension, it was an ad-blocker, that I think was taken down. I'm gonna try adding back all the things I had except the extension and see how it does.
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@darkstar9386 you're in the middle if a sync aren't you? The sync USB or something got corrupt so it's trying to do an initial get again.
Open up vivaldi://sync and you can investigate what's going on in there. Look at what is hitting your hard drive... there's only 1 entry from the vivaldi.exe process, and a bunch from System.
@Ayespy said in 100% Disk Usage:
This would not be the first time that software aimed at system security singled out Vivaldi (because it's new, unfamiliar, "not trusted") and interfered with it.
But, I don't see any security software being active in the list. The issue is the hard drive has high activity. Looking at the resource monitor we see that Vivaldi's sync related files are being written, mostly by the System process, at least in the part of the list we can see. This fits with what I was saying based just on the symptoms, low data throughput but high disk activity measurement suggests lots of little files being written. That's exactly what we see in the resource monitor.
This keeps happening every time @darkstar9386 launches Vivaldi because he never lets it finish. The next time he starts up Vivaldi it restarts what I'm guessing is an initial get from the server.
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Ah dang, you refreshed your profile. Ok, nuclear option, but it clearly demonstrates that it was an issue with your profile. Could be that extension you mention was in a funky state, but looking at the resource monitor we can see exactly which files are being touched. I'm not at my desk right now so I can't look to see what the guid that vivaldi.exe was writing to is exactly. But we definitely see a bunch of writes happening that occur during a sync.
I know this specific pain, though it happens to me on Android not my workstation. Somehow my profile gets into some weird state where there's a sync conflict it cannot resolve. Eventually, after failing to successfully complete a sync, something else happens and it decides it's time to download all 850,000+ records from the server. That takes many hours to complete and typically fails several times, thus restarting each time. At some point s few days later, often seth me babysitting it, the "initial get" completes and no data is lost. I can't just blow away my local profile because that would result in data loss, I need it to upload several hundred to a few thousand bookmarks that have been created during the period when it wasn't able to sync successfully.
Anyways, if you see those files being written when your disk is reporting 100%, which BTW only means that there was disk activity, not that the disk is maxed our for the measurement time frame. Then open up that sync internals page and look at the events and the log, and you should be able to see what's going on. Watching those you can see if it fails, or completes. When it finally finishes your drive should return back to normal.
One last thing, since you didn't reply to it, I guess there weren't really any other symptoms of a problem? No performance issues? Your disk still had plenty if bandwidth available, and other performance measurements were fine. The 100% just means that for whatever the rolling average timeframe is, there wasn't ever any idle time. As I mentioned, this is different than the drive being maxed out and unable to handle more data.
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This is why we need to always remember the ABCDEs - Always Be Closing Defective Extensions :face_with_stuck-out_tongue_winking_eye:
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@Pathduck True, though I still think sync was the most likely culprit. That, and Cortana and the registry are active, that's pretty much all we can see that is touching the disc. An underlying root cause could possibly be a failing disc. There is essentially no data throughput, yet also no idle time on the drive. That can be indicative of lots of tiny files, or also a drive that is starting to fail as one write after another has to be retried.
But you can see the sync db is being written, by System, as well as lots of locations that could be synced. If the OP wishes top try to dig into what happened, there's always the log filled to check.
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@Pathduck The problem is not anything you are running but I do suggest changing Chrome's options to not run any background programs after closing. My Firefox Developer's Edition uses way more RAM than you show with Chrome with no problems (I have 6GB).
Make sure you have latest version (1909) of Win 10.. One of Micro$oft's updates made Task Manager always show 100% even though other specs were well within system's capabilities. Believe the problem was with one of Window's programs running which didn't show amount of usage.
- Might try turning off Windows Search. Type and run the command net.exe stop “Windows search” in Command Prompt. Doing this will prevent Windows Search from running until Windows is restarted.
- Might try using CheckDisk utility program.
- Disble the Startup programs at boot temprarily.
- Disable certain Windows programs (first click Start, then type services and click Enter):
A) In the Services window, look for the service called Superfetch. Right-click on that item and click Stop. Don’t exit out of this window.
Open Task Manager to see if your usage dropped. If not, right-click on Superfetch again and click Start to re-enable it.
C) Next, see if another service is causing the problem. Repeat the steps above with two more services, including Background Intelligent Transfer Service and Windows Search, checking to see if disk usage drops after each attempt.
D) If any of these steps stopped your disk usage problem, then you’ll want to right-click the service that caused disk usage to drop, then click Properties > Startup type > Disabled. This prevents the service from starting up and should cure your disk usage problem permanently.- If nothing helps, try "100% Disk Usage in Windows 10 Fixed With 14 Tricks" at https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-tips-fix-100-disk-usage-improve-windows-performance/
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Windows 10 is a good OS, but certainly before it really is, it is convenient to disable a lot of unnecessary services.
It can be done by hand, but not in all services is the function that they have very clear and if one is not very expert in the subject, one runs the risk of turning the PC into a paperweight.
It is therefore recommended for newbies to use for this purpose some utility that allows to disable the necessary services with security, for example https://www.sordum.org/8637/easy-service-optimizer-v1-2/ -
When something like this happens to me, I shut down the PC and open it after sometime.
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@TheShadow4Vivaldi said in 100% Disk Usage:
Repeat the steps above with two more services, including Background Intelligent Transfer Service
I would not disable BITS. Set it to manual instead of disabled if you feel the need to make any changes. Then it should start when you manually invoke Windows Updates, which depends on BITS to download the packages. If it is not running, the WU will not be able to download updates in the background using idle bandwidth
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@BoneTone Most of the changes are not to be done permanently. Just to see if a service is causing the problem. Troubleshooting suggestions are just that, suggestions until problem is solved. I mentioned that Micr$oft issued an update at one time which they said was causing the problem. They did take care of it eventually but other updates could cause problems as you well know.
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@TheShadow4Vivaldi said in 100% Disk Usage:
Most of the changes are not to be done permanently. Troubleshooting suggestions are just that, suggestions until problem is solved.
Except for the change I mentioned, it comes after the troubleshooting and is the proposed fix. You specifically called out that change as a permanent solution.
@TheShadow4Vivaldi said in 100% Disk Usage:
If any of these steps stopped your disk usage problem, then you’ll want to right-click the service that caused disk usage to drop, then click Properties > Startup type > Disabled. This prevents the service from starting up and should cure your disk usage problem permanently.
That's precisely why I posted what I posted. If you intended for the OP to then do something else to find the root cause and enable the service again, that was not included in your post.