How to pin down a resource hog

BuRaK

BuRaK

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I have a client who will not take anything less the a supersonic speed on his PC. We got a Windows 7 machine with everything from start-up to services optimized but according to him, computer still slows down time to time. I'm planning on installing Centrastage agent on it but not sure how it can help me locate the problem when the slow down occurs.

I would also love to hear how you guys would go about locating where the resources go.

System has an SSD primary drive with 16gb ram and core i5 2.9ghz

Thank you,
 
Simply explain to them how to start task manager and then make note of things like how much ram is being used and what the CPU usage is over a period of X seconds. Explain to them how to view all processes and then to sort by descending CPU usage and note the names of the tasks taking up the most CPU.

Just doing that at the time of the slow down will give you a lot of info to go on.

Just one item: If they are using Internet Explorer tell them to look for "iexplore.exe" tasks and see how much ram they are using. I know the customer has 16gb, but IE8/9 with Java and Flash on Windows Vista and 7 can gobble up enormous amounts of ram and bring IE to a crawl. So thats one important thing to note.
 
Ask him what he is doing when it slows down...specifically...exactly...what is he doing? And it is local programs...or online stuff?

What programs does he commonly run? What is this computer used for?

Task Manager can show a little bit of info...more specifically I'd want to sort CPU processes by utilization. Memory consumption doesn't mean much at all unless you're consuming more RAM than the system has for system RAM..and it has to turn to the pagefil. If this system has 16 gigs of RAM (way overkill 99% of computer users can't really use more than 8 gigs).....it won't matter looking at programs and processes and sorting by memory use. Unless they're running high end video editing software or CAD/Design software....they'll never get close to using much more than 50% of that memory. There's nothing wrong with using memory that you paid good money for. It's a waste of money to not use it.

I would actually go back and looking at what black magic "tweaking" was done to the system...may have disabled some services which are there to improve things. A lot of people thing that default services that aren't used...if they kill those services, the system will speed up. Nope..not the case, if a service isn't used..it isn't consuming any resources. Win7 actually did pretty good and it's best to "leave it alone" when it comes to those that got into stripping systems by following guides like BlackViper used to have.

Look into using PerfMon for some stuff....
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/securitytools/archive/2009/11/04/how-to-use-perfmon-in-windows-7.aspx
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Memory consumption doesn't mean much at all unless you're consuming more RAM than the system has for system RAM..and it has to turn to the pagefil. If this system has 16 gigs of RAM (way overkill 99% of computer users can't really use more than 8 gigs).....it won't matter looking at programs and processes and sorting by memory use. Unless they're running high end video editing software or CAD/Design software....they'll never get close to using much more than 50% of that memory. There's nothing wrong with using memory that you paid good money for. It's a waste of money to not use it.
Click to expand...

I can tell you with certainty that if the slow down issue is IE then you can have a lot of free ram and still end up being very slow. We have had machines come in with 6-8gb of ram, only using 40%-50% but when IE gets to a gigabyte or more the thing will slow down, Java will fail or web pages will claim you dont have flash installed, etc. This is with 50% of ram free. Killing IE and restarting it (via TM) fixes it until it uses up a ton of ram again and then starts getting weird. There is some kind of issue with IE on Windows vista and 7 (I think its 64 bit) when running java/flash/maybe shockwave. Doesn't happen on every machine so it can be something more unique due to other factors. This issue does not appear to happen with Firefox running the same duration of time and visiting the same web pages.
 
NYJimbo said:
I can tell you with certainty that if the slow down issue is IE then you can have a lot of free ram and still end up being very slow. We have had machines come in with 6-8gb of ram, only using 40%-50% but when IE gets to a gigabyte or more the thing will slow down, Java will fail or web pages will claim you dont have flash installed, etc. This is with 50% of ram free. Killing IE and restarting it (via TM) fixes it until it uses up a ton of ram again and then starts getting weird. There is some kind of issue with IE on Windows vista and 7 (I think its 64 bit) when running java/flash/maybe shockwave. Doesn't happen on every machine so it can be something more unique due to other factors. This issue does not appear to happen with Firefox running the same duration of time and visiting the same web pages.
Click to expand...

I'll bet a case of Guinness that if you dug into IE deeper...you'd find other processes depending on IE...which are actually your culprit. And they'll either spike memory or CPU by themselves....not under the guise of IE...or they may even remain hidden. Example...rootkits. Or DNS redirects. Or any of the millions of horrid plugins and add-ons for IE. Or outdated and probably already exploited (poisoned) versions of web players like Java. Dig deeper...and you'd find the actual cause. ;)
 
I have a client that has the issue of the PC slowing down every 5 minutes or so. I've run all the diagnostics that I can think of. One thing I did find was that the MFT was in 2 fragments. Wouldn't really perform a defrag on the MFT at this level, but I did, and although it didn't cure the issue, it did ease it a little.

The system in my case is a Win 7 x64 Pro system, RAID 1 drives, Core i5, but only 4GB RAM. My MSP platform (N-Able) is constantly complaining that the PC is running short on memory.

Next step is to up the RAM, which because of the system, I'm upping by 8GB. Hopefully, this will help. The client regularly has Multiple IE tabs, multiple Firefox tabs, Word, Excel and Thunderbird open at the same time, so the extra RAM won't go amiss.

Andy
 
I'm not sure the issue is ram related. Did you check to see how much was being used after a fresh boot up?

I think the issue may be due more to over heating or a virus, unless you see the ram is going over and the page file is kicking in... the hard drive (even a SSD) is no match for RAM.
 
Process Explorer and Autoruns - your best friends when troubleshooting things like this. As YOSC stated, IE plugins or plugins for any browser really are likely culprits. Also, what AV are you running? Scanning in real-time and web scanning can affect things and many AV's are simply resource hogs. Also, make sure if any previous antivirus was installed that it was properly uninstalled, use the removal tools from Norton, Kaspersky, McAfee etc. to properly remove them. Even after a standard uninstall through add/remove programs drivers and dll files and such can be left over and cause conflicts, Autoruns will show these if they are left over.

:)

*Sorry, I can't post links to Process Explorer and Autoruns since I'm new here.
 
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