On 08/12/2011 6:18 AM, Robert Miles wrote:
On 12/4/2011 4:06 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
Anyway, stoppping the PCA service and setting its start mode to "Manual"
does the trick for me. While I was at it I also disabled Superfetch,
which drops the memory usage of this svchost to a fraction of what it
used before, and the CPU usage to 0%, and I don't see any performance
difference.
Are you aware that the Superfetch service deliberately tries to use
most of the
memory not otherwise in use as a cache for the most frequently
accessed disk
files, in order to speed up accesses to those files? I've found it
rather slow to
release this cache memory when some other program needs it, though.
In my experience Superfetch does a phenomenally bad job of predicting
which files I (or my wife) actually plan to use. The machine is sluggish
not (just) because the memory is uselessly tied up, but because the disk
is constantly busy fetching data that will never be used and penalizes
access to the data I actually do need. The memory wastage just compounds
the problem by contributing additional swapping on top of all this other
extra disk activity.
Both computers at my house saw *significant increases* in performance
and responsiveness when I disabled Superfetch a few months ago.
Ryan
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