Sluggish Everything After Resume

[SevenAndSeven]

My Windows 7 64 bit installation is an upgrade from Vista.

Recently, when I log on after being away for a few hours -- sleep? -- the PC runs everything slugglish. If I click anything in the browser -- Chrome, Firefox, or IE, I get the constantly spinning wheel cursor. The OS is running, but the applications all seem to hang. When I try to kill the processes, nothing happens until Windows offers to kill what is not responsive.

I close out the applications that can be closed, then pull the plug to reboot.

I have 32 gig of RAM and the highest mem usage of any app is ~400 mb and maybe 6 gig in total.

Has anyone else seen this?

 

[bjrichus]

I have seen this kind of thing. For about 10 seconds everything was fine but after that, it was slow as anything. Then after a couple of minutes everything is back to normal.

So I started up the task manager and let it sleep again.

On wake up, good old Search Indexer was doing it's thing and once it ended everything was good again.... :huh:

 

[Uber Philf]

upgrade was your first mistake, if more problems arise, maybe you should look at doing a fresh install, vista to 7, not so good with the upgrade, if it was 7 RC to RTM, then that wouldn't be so bad.

 

[SevenAndSeven]

I'll have to look for Search Indexer in the Task Manager Process list next time this happens. I usually look for the processes taking up the most memory or CPU time--I didn't see Search Indexer in the top 5 or 10.

Where do you set the scheduling options for Indexer?

 

[SevenAndSeven]

I consider a fresh install I problems keep getting worse. Finding license keys and reinstalling is a hassle. But maybe it's less a hassle than coping with mysterious problems for weeks and months.

upgrade was your first mistake, if more problems arise, maybe you should look at doing a fresh install, vista to 7, not so good with the upgrade, if it was 7 RC to RTM, then that wouldn't be so bad.

 

[Uber Philf]

well, upgrading seems easy as now, but is one huge pain in the bum to get working properly once problems start occurring, your better off starting fresh first go, then doing an upgrade, and fiddling with problems for the next few months, until you realize you've wasted so much time, fixing problems that don't come to an end.

P.S,if ya need a hand, don't hessitate to ask

 

[bowzee]

Hey, I have the same problem! I thought that disabling the Power Management "Turn off the display" would fix it but it doesn't. I am not using the sleep function and I have two monitors.

 

[Tews]

Hey, I have the same problem! I thought that disabling the Power Management "Turn off the display" would fix it but it doesn't. I am not using the sleep function and I have two monitors.

Your problem is impossible to diagnose because you provide no information to go on... click on the link in my sig, and fill in your system specs... if you are not sure what all of your specs are, enter dxdiag in the search box, save the report to your desktop, then just copy and paste the specs in.... Then we can more readily help with your issue...

 

[SevenAndSeven]

Uber Philf, thanks for the offer!

Bowzee, I'm also running two monitors, but somehow I don't that is the problem? I just installed the new Nvidia drivers, 191.00.

(I just saw the fans at full speed when resuming from Sleep problem, so I disabled Hybrid Sleep.)

The sluggishness problem only appears every few days.

Hey, I have the same problem! I thought that disabling the Power Management "Turn off the display" would fix it but it doesn't. I am not using the sleep function and I have two monitors.

 

[engin33r]

That's a hard one to diagnose from you info, it could be prefetch or indexing or a number of things, including ACPI drivers.


I have to agree that an upgrade is not the way forward, your better off installing from fresh.

Try reinstalling, if you need help just ask..

~Mike

 

[bowzee]

Uber Philf, thanks for the offer!

Bowzee, I'm also running two monitors, but somehow I don't that is the problem? I just installed the new Nvidia drivers, 191.00.

(I just saw the fans at full speed when resuming from Sleep problem, so I disabled Hybrid Sleep.)

The sluggishness problem only appears every few days.

Hey, I have the same problem! I thought that disabling the Power Management "Turn off the display" would fix it but it doesn't. I am not using the sleep function and I have two monitors.

Hey SevenAndSeven, I read somewhere that having two monitors is what triggers this particular bug. With me it happens every single time I leave the computer unattended for a few hours. The Windows Media Player is the first program that goes unresponsive and if I leave the computer unattended again then everything goes unresponsive and I have to reboot, which has to be done "pulling the power cord" (I actually hold down the power button for 4 seconds).

Hey Tews, thank you for the reply, I will follow your procedure (which I didn't read yet), I just can't do it just right now, I will do it within the next few days.

 

[SevenAndSeven]

After using the new nVidia driver 191.00 for a few days, the problem came back. In my case the problem arises every 4-6 days.

I stopped and started "netman" from the command-line, no help.

Also stopped and restarted DNS client.

Interestingly, although network connectivity in each of the Chrome, IE, and Firefox browsers were unusably sluggish, the Firefox inside a Linux installation through VMWare on the same Windows 7 box browsed perfectly fine!

OH!

I hadn't properly installed the latest Gigabit NetXtreme Gigabit Controller Driver. I just installed it. We'll see in 4-6 more days what happens.

 

[SevenAndSeven]

I updated all my Intel Chipset Drivers and this problem came back while I was working at the computer. The problem doesn't just arise after a resume. The only constant seems to be the computer having not been rebooted for several consecutive days.

 

[johnhoh]

I would try running for a couple days with 4GB of memory, just to see if win7 is not liking the fact that you have 32GB.

 

[SevenAndSeven]

It could be the memory. I have passed the memory tests run by the BIOS. Systematically pulling out the memory and seeing the results is the rigorous way but a PITA. I would rather reboot the computer every three days and wait for Intel or Microsoft to release drivers that fix the problems. I suspect the pace of driver releases will pickup after Windows 7 is released to retail.

The most recent intel chipset package I could install was 9.0.0.15 from Dell even though the latest version from Intel downloads is 9.0.0.19. Some of the drivers installed are way older than you expect.

Just installed update

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974431

we'll see.

 

[johnhoh]

Just to clarify my previous post, I did not mention the memory because it might be bad, and did not mean there was a need to keep swapping out dimms in order to test them all and find the bad one. Even if your memory dimms themselves are perfect, win7 may not properly manage the 32GB.

After a few days ( I assume superfetch is not disabled) win7 may be overloaded with background tasks because of the abundance of memory. So removing any 28GB and just leaving 4GB one time will tell you that.

 

[SevenAndSeven]

John, thanks for the clarification. Just wondering, is there a basis for this concern? My naive thinking is that with Microsoft's experience doing server OS's that big memory shouldn't be a problem.

Wouldn't those background tasks be visible through the Task manager?

I just had a lockup today. If this situation doesn't fix itself after a few more rounds of drivers and hotfixes, I should seriously consider converting this box to a x86 MacOSX.

 

[bowzee]

It could be the memory. I have passed the memory tests run by the BIOS. Systematically pulling out the memory and seeing the results is the rigorous way but a PITA. I would rather reboot the computer every three days and wait for Intel or Microsoft to release drivers that fix the problems. I suspect the pace of driver releases will pickup after Windows 7 is released to retail.

The most recent intel chipset package I could install was 9.0.0.15 from Dell even though the latest version from Intel downloads is 9.0.0.19. Some of the drivers installed are way older than you expect.

Just installed update

An update is available to improve the stability and reliability of Windows 7 and of Windows Server 2008 R2

we'll see.

Hi SevenAndSeven,

Thanks for the tip. This update showed up (automatically) on Windows Update a couple of days ago. I installed it but the problem persists.

bowzee.

 

[johnhoh]

The reason you might not see this on task manager is that you may not be waiting on the cpu. As windows has become bigger and broader, it has found things to do with all of your memory whether you want it to or not, which sometimes speeds the system up, but perhaps not always. I am not sure if there is different memory usage patterns between win7 and winserver08, but like you say maybe they are similar and this is not the issue. Memory leaks (obviously not operating as designed) and superfetch (even while operating as designed) both eat up memory over several hours/days, and got me thinking that your system with all its memory is different than most of the rest of us, so you may be exposed to different windows behavior than the rest of us.

Of course it could be many other things like a bad driver or system corruption

 

[bummpr]

I updated all my Intel Chipset Drivers and this problem came back while I was working at the computer. The problem doesn't just arise after a resume. The only constant seems to be the computer having not been rebooted for several consecutive days.

Are you sure that the drivers were updated...did you use the -overall parameter???