Any explanations of random moments of low responsiveness?

I keep a number of desktop gadgets open that monitor the CPU, GPU,
disks, RAM, etc. Occasionally I'll see that even typing stuff into text
entry windows gets utterly unresponsive. I look over to the gadgets and
they all report that there's no abnormal loads on anything at the
moment, none of the CPU cores are pegged at 100%, plenty of RAM
available (hardly ever over 50%, mostly at or near 25%), and hardly any
disk activity either. Yet, typing becomes sluggish, and mouse clicks go
ignored (though mouse movement seems to proceed normally).

I usually notice this in Thunderbird, but I've seen it happening in
other programs too.

CPU: FX-8300, 8-core
RAM: 16 GB, DDR3
GPU: GTX 750 Ti
Storage (internal): 1 SSD, and 4 HDD's.
Latest Win 10 Fall Creator's Update.

Very mysterious.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
I keep a number of desktop gadgets open that monitor the CPU, GPU,
disks, RAM, etc. Occasionally I'll see that even typing stuff into text
entry windows gets utterly unresponsive. I look over to the gadgets and
they all report that there's no abnormal loads on anything at the
moment, none of the CPU cores are pegged at 100%, plenty of RAM
available (hardly ever over 50%, mostly at or near 25%), and hardly any
disk activity either. Yet, typing becomes sluggish, and mouse clicks go
ignored (though mouse movement seems to proceed normally).

I usually notice this in Thunderbird, but I've seen it happening in
other programs too.

CPU: FX-8300, 8-core
RAM: 16 GB, DDR3
GPU: GTX 750 Ti
Storage (internal): 1 SSD, and 4 HDD's.
Latest Win 10 Fall Creator's Update.

Very mysterious.

Yousuf Khan

Filterkeys ?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/...ows-filterkeys

And while you're at it, you should probably take a lap
through the Settings panel and make sure Microsoft hasn't
got some other stupid stuff turned on. Like maybe, the
keyboard handler listening for StickyKeys.

You could try changing your Power Schema away from "Balanced"
as a test, but I'd try that one last. As it probably won't help.
Using the "Full Power" schema is best applied to systems with
movie playback stutter.

You could also have a look through your installed programs,
for something like a "hotkey" based tool, as something like
that could be doing it. Maybe your hotkey software needs
a Windows 10 update.

*******

The desktop in Windows 10 seems to be made out of HTML/JS,
and a recent test case hints that during garbage collection,
you won't be able to click stuff with your mouse and get
a response on the desktop... until garbage collection (memory)
is completed. On my machine here, I was detecting 20 second
to 60 second outages.

Open this 36,300 page PDF in MSEdge, search for some keywords
while viewing the PDF, then try and click icons on the desktop
later. And you get a taste of it. It takes 7.5 minutes to search
for the keyword "AddNodeIfNotThere". Afterwards, a service
called RpcSs can be seen railed on one core.

https://download.microsoft.com/downl...er_2006_R2.pdf

It's also kinda shades of Wordpad. Open a 1.5GB text file with
Wordpad, and watch as it stays pretty well constantly in a
"Not Responding" state. When the "Not responding" notification
goes away... it's still not really responding. All you can do in
that state, is kill it. You have enough RAM on your machine,
to run that test case.

Paul

Paul wrote in news
Yousuf Khan wrote:
I keep a number of desktop gadgets open that monitor the CPU, GPU,
disks, RAM, etc. Occasionally I'll see that even typing stuff into
text entry windows gets utterly unresponsive. I look over to the
gadgets and they all report that there's no abnormal loads on
anything at the moment, none of the CPU cores are pegged at 100%,
plenty of RAM available (hardly ever over 50%, mostly at or near
25%), and hardly any disk activity either. Yet, typing becomes
sluggish, and mouse clicks go ignored (though mouse movement seems to
proceed normally).

I usually notice this in Thunderbird, but I've seen it happening in
other programs too.

CPU: FX-8300, 8-core
RAM: 16 GB, DDR3
GPU: GTX 750 Ti
Storage (internal): 1 SSD, and 4 HDD's.
Latest Win 10 Fall Creator's Update.

Very mysterious.

Yousuf Khan

Filterkeys ?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/...ng-delay-in-ke
ystrokes-appearing-due-to-windows-filterkeys#!en-ca%2Fhelp%2F894040%2Fa
djust-long-delay-in-keystrokes-appearing-due-to-windows-filterkeys

And while you're at it, you should probably take a lap
through the Settings panel and make sure Microsoft hasn't
got some other stupid stuff turned on. Like maybe, the
keyboard handler listening for StickyKeys.

You could try changing your Power Schema away from "Balanced"
as a test, but I'd try that one last. As it probably won't help.
Using the "Full Power" schema is best applied to systems with
movie playback stutter.

You could also have a look through your installed programs,
for something like a "hotkey" based tool, as something like
that could be doing it. Maybe your hotkey software needs
a Windows 10 update.

*******

The desktop in Windows 10 seems to be made out of HTML/JS,
and a recent test case hints that during garbage collection,
you won't be able to click stuff with your mouse and get
a response on the desktop... until garbage collection (memory)
is completed. On my machine here, I was detecting 20 second
to 60 second outages.

Open this 36,300 page PDF in MSEdge, search for some keywords
while viewing the PDF, then try and click icons on the desktop
later. And you get a taste of it. It takes 7.5 minutes to search
for the keyword "AddNodeIfNotThere". Afterwards, a service
called RpcSs can be seen railed on one core.

https://download.microsoft.com/downl...9A-41CA-A119-5
D37382CA045/BizTalk_Server_2006_R2.pdf

It's also kinda shades of Wordpad. Open a 1.5GB text file with
Wordpad, and watch as it stays pretty well constantly in a
"Not Responding" state. When the "Not responding" notification
goes away... it's still not really responding. All you can do in
that state, is kill it. You have enough RAM on your machine,
to run that test case.

Paul


I have seen similar performance when OneDrive is messing around with
whatever it thinks it must be doing. I have seen it eat up 35% of my AMD
A10 5800l cpu. Add in that Windows sometimes thinks that that is the
right time to refresh the search indexes and one can see some severe
performance problems.

On 3/5/2018 8:26 PM, Tim wrote:
I have seen similar performance when OneDrive is messing around with
whatever it thinks it must be doing. I have seen it eat up 35% of my AMD
A10 5800l cpu. Add in that Windows sometimes thinks that that is the
right time to refresh the search indexes and one can see some severe
performance problems.

Yeah, I've seen SearchIndexer doing similar things in the past, but this
time it wasn't SearchIndexer, thus why it's a mystery.

I did see one particular HP printer program taking up about 14% of CPU,
which I killed, and the responsiveness went up. But it was only taking
14%, not 100% of any particular core, so it's not something that you'd
normally think about being a problem!

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote in news:q5idnVMTE-
:

On 3/5/2018 8:26 PM, Tim wrote:
I have seen similar performance when OneDrive is messing around with
whatever it thinks it must be doing. I have seen it eat up 35% of my AMD
A10 5800l cpu. Add in that Windows sometimes thinks that that is the
right time to refresh the search indexes and one can see some severe
performance problems.

Yeah, I've seen SearchIndexer doing similar things in the past, but this
time it wasn't SearchIndexer, thus why it's a mystery.

I did see one particular HP printer program taking up about 14% of CPU,
which I killed, and the responsiveness went up. But it was only taking
14%, not 100% of any particular core, so it's not something that you'd
normally think about being a problem!

Yousuf Khan

Sometimes it is not CPU so much as interrupts. If something is generating a
slew of interrupts that can affect the responsiveness of the system,