Windows 7 Excessive Cache WS Usage

[satcoms]

Occasionally windows will allocate all available physical ram to cache. When this happens the system slows to a crawl since it has to use virtual memory. I've looked at process explorer and there are no applications that seem to be using abnormal amounts of memory. It also happens on startup with nothing running. It resolves itself randomly and spontaneously. One minute there will be less than 100MB free then it will clear itself and be back down to a normal level of 1300mb to 1600mb allocated. I've attached a screen shot from process explorer showing the drop when it clears itself. Note in the picture, when the physical memory is full it is all used by cache WS. Any ideas on what to look for next would be appreciated.

[satcoms]

Here is another picture of the demand ramping up and then maxing out.

Disabling superfetch does not seem to make a difference.

[soldier1st]

  On 20/06/2011 at 00:47, satcoms said:

Here is another picture of the demand ramping up and then maxing out.

Disabling superfetch does not seem to make a difference.

What are you running/doing when this happens?

[satcoms]

In that case it started about 30 seconds after a reboot with nothing running.

It has happened while browsing the web, transferring fires across the network.....I can't pin down anything in particular that triggers it.

On bootup, the only thing loading is Security Essentials.

I wish there was a way to find out exactly what windows was filling that space with.

[bjoswald]

Have you tried looking at the Processes list of Task Manager when this happens? You might find a misbehaving app in there.

Also, have you tried doing a "Selective Startup" from msconfig?

[soldier1st]

Did this happen when you first installed windows? or did it start to happen after installing something? also what are your system specs?

[satcoms]

I have tried watching the process list and can't point to anything in particular that seems to be starting when this happens.

I have been running this installation of windows 7 since October of 2010. This problem only started happening in the last few months. The only new thing I've installed is normal updates and The Witcher 2.

The system is a q6600 @ 3gz, 4Gb of DDR2, 640gb hard drive, Radeon 6950

I did a selective startup last night and disabled everything. I'll see if the problem happens again, if not I'll start adding things back one by one.

[soldier1st]

Try this: when in task manager, view/select columns and add i/o read bytes/ i/o write bytes/other bytes and watch the numbers. if any of them fluctuates in high numbers in a short period of time, then you may have found the culprit.

[ToneKnee]

Your system shouldn't slow to a crawl if your trying to do something, Superfetch in Windows 7 was changed so the user would get seamless interaction with the desktop without you knowing it's putting things into the memory. If you were doing something even remotely intensive like loading a web browser up, Windows 7 will stop fetching data into it's cache. It only does it when your not doing anything or very little.

Also, post your system specs, are you using the latest drivers? Motherboard etc? If things are slowing to a crawl, then it's possible there is a memory leak somewhere, you should also check to see how much your memory will give off errors via performance monitor while it's doing this, could be a bad RAM module, try taking some RAM out of your system to try and isolate the problem.

[satcoms]

Update

I disabled all non essentials in startup through MS Config and the problem has gone away.

Superfetch is turned back on and working properly.

I'm going to enable each startup item one by one and see if I can pinpoint what was causing my problem. If I can figure it out I'll report back.

Thanks for the ideas!