On Thu, 2/6/2025 10:34 PM, micky wrote:
Looking at Task Manager for the last 20+ minutes, waiting for Eudora to display the 2 or 3 emails it downloaded at the start of the 20+ minutes: Eudora using 15 to 25% of the CPU
Firefox using in the low 40% of the CPU and
Forte Agent about 15% of the CPU
Eudora says for each of two email servers, "Completed. Waiting for new messages to display". Still, maybe it still has to filter the incoming
mail. I think there are only 2 emails pending, so it would normally do
this in 5 or 10 seconds but lets say well under a minute. Since it's
been using about 20% of the CPU for 30 minutes now, that's 6 minutes, so
what is it doing? Can I assume almost all of its cpu time is spent
swapping in and out with the other two main programs?
Is this called thrashing?
I'm not actively doing anything with Firefox but can I assume that any
tabs that have youtube or advertising videos are playing those videos (without sound) and using CPU. I have many, many tabs and each video
would use some CPU. I can't imagine what else is. Only Firefox has any
disk usage. Eudora and Agent have zero almost all the time, and only
0.1mb when they have some.
How can Forte Agent use 15% of the CPU? I'm using it now to type, but
most of this time Task Manager was on top, and I'm not using Agent at
all. AFAIK it's doing nothing at all, since I'm not there it to make it
do something and I have nothing that runs automatically -- I turned that
off 10+ years ago -- and nothing I started that is still running.
Downloads and uploads are so quick now, that they finish almost as soon
as I start them. So what's it doing?
That leaves about 20 or 25% of the CPU, but I'm not concerned about
that. . No other process uses more than 5% of the CPU, and who can
begrudge a process 5%, so I'm only concerned about the 3 programs I list first.
Scroll down a bit past half way here, and get a copy of Process Explorer.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer
If you Run As Administrator on that, then find the Parent PID of
a web browser like Firefox, do "Properties" on the process in question,
then select the "Threads" tab, Process Explorer can take some profiling samples. Unfortunately, the sampling it does, is not entirely asynchronous,
so the measurements are "polluted". But still, you can watch and see
what threads are busy in there. For example. you will see XUL.dll, some
entry in there is busy when the Firefox window is doing a redraw
(which is different than the normal compositing activity Firefox would do).
*******
The other tool is Process Monitor. You're looking in the trace,
for rampant system activity, for stuff that you would normally
not expect to be needed.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon
That one shows activity versus process name. So for example,
if you see CreateFile/ReadFile/WriteFile activity, that can
be a process doing I/O.
*******
Your OS is NOT swapping :-)
This OS is different than WinXP. In WinXP, using the
usual techniques, you could busy the pagefile in 4K operations,
fragment the living shit out of the pagefile, and notice
the system behaves poorly when "the pagefile unwinds itself".
It uses to take at least 30 seconds, before WinXP would return
to normal, after a swapper thing was closed.
This OS does not do that. For the most part, it reports
"out of RAM" to a running process, rather than tempting it
with promises of doggy treats. This OS has a Memory Compressor.
In Process Monitor, you can see it at the top of the listing.
Task Manager DOES NOT list this process, because the process
has no name, and Task Manager won't list a thing with no name.
See how clever the devs were, to cover their tracks ? The Memory
Compressor is part of a scheme to "not burn holes" in your SSD
with the swapping and swapping. It saves on swapping.
I keep the pagefile.sys set to 1GB here, as a nominal setting,
but the machine has quite a bit of RAM. And using your Task Manager,
you can check the memory performance entry and see how much remains.
Using Task Manager, since I started running Windows 10 while
writing this post on my Win11 setup, Task Manager tells
me that MsMpEng.exe has done 37.9GB of reads and 20MB of writes.
It's been scanning the shit out of C: :-) (In the Task Manager
display, go to the Column bar and add "I/O read bytes" and
"I/O write bytes" columns.
In services.msc, you can try turning off "sysmain" service,
which is a service that considers where executables should be
placed on disk for best performance. On an SSD C: drive,
a service like this does not have a purpose. The seek time
on an SSD, is independent of what LBA a program is resting on.
My observation is, I can sometimes see some activities finish
faster if sysmain is turned off, but I can't really say I've caught
it in Process Monitor as being a busy little thing. But if you want
to locate it, you could try
tasklist /svc # used to be WinXP pro but not home, but should
# run on anything now.
Look for the sysmain entry, note the PID, go over to Process Explorer
(before you turn Sysmain off), locate the PID in the list, it will be
a "svchost", and then you can do Properties on it, and watch what it
is doing, and see if it is using cycles in the Threads tab,
while your other processes are running.
*******
Summary: I see weird stuff on mine too, but the symptoms don't match yours.
I cannot even recommend "benchmarking techniques" as a means of
spotting aberrant behavior. I don't think we would learn too much
from that.
The OS has more layers than just Ring3 and Ring0. Containerization
would run in a different ring. There is Nested Virtualization
(mine doesn't work on AMD Zen3). We have no decent block diagram
of the architecture, showing all the rings and what runs in them.
We can't be sure Task Manager paints a complete picture.
It would be pretty hard for me, to diagnose your computer at
this distance, when I can't even diagnose the piece of shit
on the left-hand screen right in front of me :-/ For example,
if I stop moving the mouse on the other machine, MsMpEng seems
to drive the CPU to 40% while it scans. If I were to reach
for ProcExp and try to adjust a viewer ? Why, MsMpEng would stop
doing, what it is doing.
It all has the characteristics of malware... without being malware.
The devs who made this stuff, are more clever than we are.
Paul
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