Explorer.exe taking all my RAM - Need help diagnosing w/Process Ex

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Guest

About every other day, my Vista Ultimate system slooooooows down and I notice
that explorer.exe is taking everybit of the 4gb of RAM I have. I tried to
take a look at what was going on using Process Explorer but I'm afraid I'm
not able to see what's going on. Can anyone point me in the direction of what
I should be looking for?
 
How long has Vista been on your machine?. Vista has a learning curve. It
learns from you the files you use the most. At startup/ log in, it loads
those files directly into RAM for instant access by you. This feature is
called SuperFetch. Vista uses all available memory for this, and only frees
up memory for other tasks as needed. That's why memory usage is 100% pretty
much all the time.

If you use different apps/programs daily and have no set group you use all
the time, the system 'freezes' as it dumps programs and apps from memory
and loads the new ones selected by you.

Can you turn off SuperFetch?. I don't think so. Not unless enough users
complain to Microsoft to write a patch with a software switch to turn it
off. HTH
 
It's been on my machine since November. I've not had any problems until a few
weeks ago. The only thing running on it is Office 2007 and the BDD 2007. Time
to return to XP.
--
Sandy Wood
Orange County District Attorney


DandyDon said:
How long has Vista been on your machine?. Vista has a learning curve. It
learns from you the files you use the most. At startup/ log in, it loads
those files directly into RAM for instant access by you. This feature is
called SuperFetch. Vista uses all available memory for this, and only frees
up memory for other tasks as needed. That's why memory usage is 100% pretty
much all the time.

If you use different apps/programs daily and have no set group you use all
the time, the system 'freezes' as it dumps programs and apps from memory
and loads the new ones selected by you.

Can you turn off SuperFetch?. I don't think so. Not unless enough users
complain to Microsoft to write a patch with a software switch to turn it
off. HTH
Click to expand...
 
Sandy Wood said:
It's been on my machine since November. I've not had any problems until a
few
weeks ago. The only thing running on it is Office 2007 and the BDD 2007.
Time
to return to XP.
Click to expand...

Open Reliability and Performance Monitor from Start | type into the search
box. When it pops up at the top right click Run as Administrator. Expand
the CPU, Disk and Memory sections in the right pane. Does that give any
indication what explorer is doing, file access or ?.

Did you try a system restore to before the problem surfaced?
 
DandyDon said:
Can you turn off SuperFetch?. I don't think so. Not unless enough users
complain to Microsoft to write a patch with a software switch to turn it
off. HTH
Click to expand...

*If* it is superfetch, you wouldn't want to turn it off anyway. Caching is
beneficial overall, even if it sometimes has some big 'misses'. More likely,
they could allow you to configure SuperFetch to be more or less aggressive;
or alternatively have Superfetch ease off if it finds it's hit rate is too
low.

In fact, you may find there already some registry tweak buit in to do this;
we'll only find out in the fulness of time...
 
Thanks for the tip and link to the Perf mon in Vista. As I right this my RAM
is fine but now Explorer.exe is taking 92-99% of my CPU. The sections in
Reliability and Performance Monitor do a good job at showing me what
explorer.exe is taking but not what is going on underneath. I'll keep
searching......
 
Sandy Wood said:
Thanks for the tip and link to the Perf mon in Vista. As I right this my
RAM
is fine but now Explorer.exe is taking 92-99% of my CPU. The sections in
Reliability and Performance Monitor do a good job at showing me what
explorer.exe is taking but not what is going on underneath. I'll keep
searching......
Click to expand...

On one system I saw a problem where Explorer would grope all the newsgroup
messages in the message store in Windows Mail. This would go on for several
hours, then stop for a half hour or hour then back to it. Explorer use went
high then too, around 80%, in normal priority so yeah the system bogged way
down. That was in a standard user account, which had been working fine for
a long time, then this problem appeared.

I haven't figured that one out yet, though I did get a work around. Created
another user account and in accessing the same newsgroups the same groping
happens periodically but not by Explorer, it's either the
Searchfilterhost.exe or the SearchProtocolHost.exe (I don't remember which).
That is running as a background process, of course it's doing the indexing
on those messages, and that doesn't slow the system down. Why explorer was
doing it I don't know yet. Have you looked to the Disk activity using the
Explorer PID to see if it's reading files?

You might want to create a new account and test in that one.
 
Well, I don't use Microsoft Mail often, if at all. Thanks for the thought
however. I did see it kick off once this morning right after I right-clicked
the round Start button and chose Explore to browse my files. The CPU flew up
the 99% and I had to kill the process to get it to settle down. The box that
this is happening on is a 64-bit system with 64-bit Vista on it - I've got a
notebook with 32-bit Vista that doesn't exhibit the problem. I may reinstall
a 32-bit os on it to see how it does.
 
Sandy Wood said:
Well, I don't use Microsoft Mail often, if at all. Thanks for the thought
however. I did see it kick off once this morning right after I
right-clicked
the round Start button and chose Explore to browse my files. The CPU flew
up
the 99% and I had to kill the process to get it to settle down. The box
that
this is happening on is a 64-bit system with 64-bit Vista on it - I've got
a
notebook with 32-bit Vista that doesn't exhibit the problem. I may
reinstall
a 32-bit os on it to see how it does.
Click to expand...
"Rock" wrote:
Click to expand...

I was just suggesting to see if explorer is groping files, not necessarily
the same ones I experienced. In any event, I don't have any specific
experience with the x64 installation, sorry. Did you create a new account
and test in there?
 
Yes, I created a Standard User account and it went well for about 40 minutes
before it started sucking up my RAM and CPU. I'm back with my normal domain
admin account and it's been fine for 3 hours. Maybe it knows I'm watching!
I've got the CPU / RAM sidebar gadget always on view!
 
you are not alone, i am also getting this problem in 64-bit Vista Ultimate,
eplorer.exe suddenly goes mental and uses 92% CPU, i may start a new thread
with a more specific title :thumbs: i have no answers for you or i as yet.
 
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