Disk activity not showing up in Resource Monitor?

[gidyn]

I've noticed that Windows Media Player is thrashing my hard drive whenever I play videos, so I tried to investigate with Resource Monitor. The "Processes with Disk Activity" pane shows it reading about 4Mb/s, but there's nothing to show for it in the "Disk Activity" pane.

Any ideas what's up?

 

[marsmimar]

Hello gidyn and welcome to Seven Forums.

In Windows Xp and Windows Vista you would have to add additional performance counters to Task Manager to specifically monitor disk activity. The counters are I/O Reads, I/O Writes, I/O Read Bytes, and I/O Write Bytes. I'm on a work computer running XP so I can't verify if this will work on Windows 7 but you might give it a look.

Identify Processes That Cause High Disk Activity

 

[gidyn]

Hello gidyn and welcome to Seven Forums.

In Windows Xp and Windows Vista you would have to add additional performance counters to Task Manager to specifically monitor disk activity. The counters are I/O Reads, I/O Writes, I/O Read Bytes, and I/O Write Bytes. I'm on a work computer running XP so I can't verify if this will work on Windows 7 but you might give it a look.

Identify Processes That Cause High Disk Activity

I'm using Resource Monitor, not Task Manager. Please see the screen shot in my original post.

 

[marsmimar]

Hello gidyn and welcome to Seven Forums.

In Windows Xp and Windows Vista you would have to add additional performance counters to Task Manager to specifically monitor disk activity. The counters are I/O Reads, I/O Writes, I/O Read Bytes, and I/O Write Bytes. I'm on a work computer running XP so I can't verify if this will work on Windows 7 but you might give it a look.

Identify Processes That Cause High Disk Activity

I'm using Resource Monitor, not Task Manager. Please see the screen shot in my original post.

Resource Monitor is a part of Task Manager. See Step 2 under Here's How.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/12523-resource-monitor.html

 

[centaur78]

Hello gidyn and welcome to Seven Forums.

In Windows Xp and Windows Vista you would have to add additional performance counters to Task Manager to specifically monitor disk activity. The counters are I/O Reads, I/O Writes, I/O Read Bytes, and I/O Write Bytes. I'm on a work computer running XP so I can't verify if this will work on Windows 7 but you might give it a look.

Identify Processes That Cause High Disk Activity

I'm using Resource Monitor, not Task Manager. Please see the screen shot in my original post.

What he meant is Resource Monitor uses ETW as the engine. Perfmon exposes ETW in Performance Monitor > Data Collector Sets > System > Event Trace Sessions. look for NtfsLog... it should be started.. as a matter of fact all the sessions should be started.

 

[gidyn]

What he meant is Resource Monitor uses ETW as the engine. Perfmon exposes ETW in Performance Monitor > Data Collector Sets > System > Event Trace Sessions. look for NtfsLog... it should be started.. as a matter of fact all the sessions should be started.

NtfsLog is running, as are all the others. All other disk activity is monitored - it's just Media Player that somehow doesn't show up.

 

[centaur78]

ok

Clicked Monitor > Stop Monitoring ... wait for a few sec and then select Start Monitoring.. It should probably resolved by now.

 

[gidyn]

Clicked Monitor > Stop Monitoring ... wait for a few sec and then select Start Monitoring.. It should probably resolved by now.

Tried it a few times.

 

[centaur78]

ok restart and check again..

 

[gidyn]

ok restart and check again..

Tried it after a few restarts.

 

[centaur78]

Right click on wmplayer.exe in resmon and select Analyze Wait Chain...

Post a snapshot of what you see there

 

[centaur78]

Hmm it looks like your pointers to the perfmon Counters are corrupted, you have to rebuild these with LODCTR from a elevated command prompt:

Close resource monitor

Click Start, and Click Run and type cmd
At the prompt, type lodctr /r and press ENTER. This will repair the pointers with the system backup store.

This will definitely solve your problem.

 

[gidyn]

Right click on wmplayer.exe in resmon and select Analyze Wait Chain...

Post a snapshot of what you see there

Strangely enough, I opened resource monitor again to do this, and now it's working! (I just fixed some broken shortcuts in the Public folder where the videos were - I don't know whether that had anything to do with it.)

The question now becomes, why is media player thrashing the hard drive? I've got 16Gb of RAM, but looping a 45MB video causes WMP to constantly read the file from disk (that's the 4Mb/s shown earlier).