microsoft
Report a problem

Fix slow file transfers in XP x64 & Server 2003 x64

Julio Franco   on 07 January 2009 - 22:34 · 6 comments & 5214 views

Advertisement (Why?)
I've been using Windows XP x64 for about a year now. My previous OS of choice was Windows 2000 which I really loved, I swore to never upgrade to XP and in a way I succeeded because XP x64 is really just Windows Server 2003 x64 with another name. The reason I finally upgraded was so I could access all of my new system's 8GB of RAM, and also because I was getting tired of writing Win2K fixes for games like Bioshock and Crysis. But from the very beginning of the transition I was disappointed; XP x64, when handling large files would slow down to a crawl.

I tried in vain to look for a solution, to give you an example: I've got a RAID5 array with 3 x 1TB hard drives and a lone Raptor 150GB for the OS. If I played back a 1080p trailer off Apple's site stored to my hard drive using Quicktime Alternative the video would start to skip massively if at the same time I copied a large file from the RAID5 array to my Raptor disk, or extracted a file using WinRAR in the same manner.

Of course this is not the only problem, just an easy way to reproduce it. When I extracted large files I noticed that the Task Manager did not report memory being used under its graph, however the counter for available memory under ‘Physical Memory' would go down a whole lot, using as much as 4GB of RAM when copying files at least that large!

Link: Slow System Performance When Copying Large Files in XP x64 & Server 2003 x64 - And a solution! @ TechSpot Blog

Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 6 additional comments
#1 Budious on 08 Jan 2009 - 06:56
What strange timing, I was just wondering if there was something that would improve the network file transfers between my XP x64 (2003 x64) workstation and Windows Home Server (2003 x86) file server. Moving several large movie files (20GB total) took about half an hour on 100Mb lan.

Also, this fix may address the unresponsiveness experienced when using the Windows Home Server backup client on an XP x64 workstation. The backup process will take up all available disk read and write access preventing other applications, the start menu, and interface from responding.

Last edited by Budious on 08 Jan 2009 - 07:17
(1 reply) #2 neoraptor on 08 Jan 2009 - 07:57
With so much pumped up system it is strange you encounter any problems. Here are couple of tips:
1. Be sure your raid is hardware - if it is onboard known good solutions are ich8r and ich9r intel chipsets, otherwise your raid is eating a lot of cpu when copping
2. Check for any process that eats a lot of cpu - you might have virus/trojan or something
3. Defrag your hdd - good option is jkdefrag and is free

Hope that helped
#2.1 Per Hansson on 08 Jan 2009 - 21:34
Hi, I'm the author of that article - Julio just posted it for me
My RAID is hardware based
If you follow the link you will see the whole description
It is not a question, it is a solution to the problem
But I thank you for your suggestions, I long dropped the software based ICH9R for a proper LSI 8704ELP hardware RAID controller
(1 reply) #3 Airlink on 08 Jan 2009 - 18:00
What I want to know is: How the heck did you install Crisis on Windows 2000? Isn't that a XP/Vista (DX9/10) Game?
#3.1 JulioFranco on 08 Jan 2009 - 21:25
We found a way around it, because of the similarity between 2000 and XP, and couple of changes will pull the trick:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic90831.html
#4 _dandy_ on 08 Jan 2009 - 20:43
That's very interesting.

For months now, it seems that whenever I copy around large (multi-GB) files, or burn a single large ISO, the "Available" entry under "Physical Memory" in Task Manager's Performance tab would decrease down to nothing (I've seen it go as low as 4MB), with the majority of processes getting swapped to disk (to the point where almost every process has its "Mem Usage" value in the Processes tab down to 200KB--the minimum, I'm guessing, that Windows has to keep in memory and not paged).

As soon as the file copy/burn is done, the "Available Physical Memory" figure shoots back up, but of course, trying to use any app at that point is tremendously slow because everything has to be read back from disk. Trying to use my system while burning something reminds me of my old 90-MHz Pentium...I just have to walk away while it's busy. I'm on an Athlon X2 4800 with 2GB. XP x64 has otherwise always been rock-solid for me (moreso than XP x86--which is why I use the 64-bit version even though I "only" have 2GB of RAM).

Interestingly though, it hasn't always been this way, and I've made the assumption that this was a memory manager tweak that Microsoft may have introduced at some point with some patch or hotfix.

I wish I would've seen this KB article before. Trying now...

Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!

Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.

Advertisement (Why?)