Intense HDD Loading?

demon8991 · 15 May 2009 at 20:23

I first noticed it when playing GTA4 after a while my computer would just load solidly and the comp would grind to an almost stop.

Then moved onto assasins creed and complted that and it was fine.

Then finished the end of the Crysis off and it started doing it again.

I have looked in my permformance meeter and the HDD shows this activity?

Is this a known issue?

smogsy · 15 May 2009 at 20:28

looks like indexing to me

demon8991 · 15 May 2009 at 20:35

Yer thats what i thought too but i dont know how i can turn it off?

And why would it be so intense when i am playing a game?

It happened over and over could only get in about 15 mins then i would have to exit.

Happy · 15 May 2009 at 20:52

What are your page file settings?

When I played GTA4 I had massive memory leaks, it would just drain all my ram (you could watch it in task manager just increasing :/), forcing my PC to write everything tot he pagefile crippling system performance and then when GTA4 ran out of ram it crashed.

demon8991 · 15 May 2009 at 20:59

Happy said:
What are your page file settings?

When I played GTA4 I had massive memory leaks, it would just drain all my ram (you could watch it in task manager just increasing :/), forcing my PC to write everything tot he pagefile crippling system performance and then when GTA4 ran out of ram it crashed.

4394mb page file

demon8991 · 15 May 2009 at 22:18

Is that ok?

miniyazz · 15 May 2009 at 22:29

Most likely, yes. What OS? And is it set to system-managed?

I'm missing the part where it's obviously indexing - didn't see anything indicating that in the disk activity - what am I missing? :s

Those logs just show disk ops relating to the game and from the page file. If you wanted, you could grab yourself another couple of sticks of RAM, even the 1066 MHz stuff is cheap enough these days, and see if the problem goes away. At the least you'll have (slightly) better performance, depending what apps you use.

Jimmy1983 · 15 May 2009 at 22:33

Do you need to change the indexing in win7 from the default?

demon8991 · 15 May 2009 at 23:19

Im using Vista Ultimate 64 bit and the solid loading still carries on for a good 5 minutes after i exit the game.

smogsy · 15 May 2009 at 23:43

just leave it on overnight let it index fully then it should do it for a while.

mine does some random indexing in games somtimes specially if the game is not multicore

Mattus · 16 May 2009 at 01:17

If it happens when you quit the games, then that's SuperFetch. It caches files that you might use into RAM to improve system performance. When you load up a game, the game uses lots of RAM so the SuperFetched files are cleared from RAM to make way for the game. After you quit the game, that RAM is free again so SuperFetch kicks in again to fill it up.

demon8991 · 16 May 2009 at 09:46

Mattus said:
If it happens when you quit the games, then that's SuperFetch. It caches files that you might use into RAM to improve system performance. When you load up a game, the game uses lots of RAM so the SuperFetched files are cleared from RAM to make way for the game. After you quit the game, that RAM is free again so SuperFetch kicks in again to fill it up.

But it happens during the game and gets so bad i have to exit after like 15mins to 30mins.

miniyazz · 16 May 2009 at 11:27

demon8991 said:
But it happens during the game and gets so bad i have to exit after like 15mins to 30mins.

Just try disabling indexing altogether. If it still has the problem, not indexing. You have very large numbers of reads from the page file and the game files. Can't see what the disk write status is though. So, just to point it out, getting an SSD would most likely make all these problems go away. 128GB Corsair for £177 is best value atm if you're considering it.
The other thing I'd try is disabling the page file just to see how it responds then, but you're pushing it a bit fine with just 4gb ram, could try moving it to different disk though.