Peter Jason wrote:


Hi, I have kept it in sight but the RAM hardly varies at all,
flat-lining at 5GB all the time, while the CPU (950 i7 8core)flies up
& dowm from 8% to 40% while sorting images and transcoding movies.
The SSD shows great fluctuations too.

i7-950 3GHz, 4C 8T, LGA1366, 6x4GB DDR3 max memory (triple channel)
No Quicksync (no internal GPU)

Since your CPU isn't railed, I take it the observed
slowness is in file operations ?

In Task Manager, you'd look at whether individual
programs could account for the RAM usage. Just to
estimate whether the OS has grabbed that RAM, or
it's your programs using it.

The System Write Cache on your system, could only
queue up maybe 1.5GB of writes. I'm not all the
big a fan of the System Write Cache, because I
think it makes the file writing process stutter
some times. But I've resisted the temptation to
find a way to shut it off.

It could be that your image sorting process is
somehow causing the file system to slow down.

And since the RAM isn't actually full, adding
more will make minimal difference.

Even release 16299 of the OS, still hasn't fixed
the Chrome build bug, where the mouse will slow
down enough it will start to stutter during
process forking attempts. But your system isn't
oversubscribed (you're running at 40% CPU), so
that bug really shouldn't be visible in your
circumstances. Keeping the CPU pinned at 100%
for long periods of time, with a lot of program
starts, tends to make that one worse, and even
if you reboot to clean it up, the symptoms come
back after as little as 30 minutes of pinned CPU.

I don't really think I could do much to tune
your system. And in Windows, the File Explorer
seems to have more trouble with large file counts,
than the NTFS file system itself. File Explorer
does stupid stuff with only 50,000 files in a folder,
whereas NTFS can handle a lot more than that without
appearing flaky.

My guess is, your file sorting program has something
to do with this, but I don't know what exactly.

Paul