Why is my system disk grinding away?

williamconifer wrote on 12/15/2002, 10:00 PM
I am a geek and so I am a bit embarrased to be asking this question. I just rendered a 7 min. slide show in VV3 with music and it took me 1 hour 2 min. ouch. I want to spell out my environment and see if I am missing something.

First off the video had dissolves between each shot. There where about 12 key framed motion shots and about 12 photos were cropped. I title (10secs) and no track filters or fx.

I was watching CPU useage and found it up and down. I would guess it was at sporadically at 100% maybe 40-50% of the time. Other wise it was spiking up and down. It would drop to <10% for like 10-15 seconds and the system disk would just gind away. Then it would jump up and the grinding would not be as intense (from what I can hear, it's a loud drive). Mem Usage was at 685,352k / 739,824k. After the render the mem dropped down to 528,296k. I still had photoshop running idle.

What stuck me is how much the system disk was grinding away. My Sys disk is sitting on IDE1 master, It's a ata100, 5500 rpm Maxtor. nothing else on IDE1. IDE2 has a Sony DRU500a DVDr on as master, again ata100. nothing else on IDE2. IDE3 (Sil IDE card ata133) master has a 7200rpm IBM 120gig HD as master and a Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 80gig hd as slave. Both ata133. The IBM has my video and audio data on it. The Seagate has Vegas on it. As you can tell I have 3/4 gig of ram ddr 2100. I am running Win2k (with updates). Both the Sys disk and the IBM are Fat32 and the IBM is NTFS. Before my render I closed and opened Vegas. The computer had been rebooted 2 hours before rendering (the editing session). The mobo is an Epox 8kha+ running the Via KT266/a chipset. The IBM is new. The Seagate is 7 months old and the Maxtor has been around the blook. I have not run defrag. What am I missing. Why is windows going to virtual memory if I still have ram left? Any help??

Thanks
jack

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 12/15/2002, 10:40 PM
Because Windows is the 800 pound gorilla it does what it wants. I see the same thing in XP. I don't know about Win2K, but in XP, Windows will swap out to the page file even when it has 60% or more memory free. Memory paging in Windows regardless of version is close to voodoo. I haven't talked to anyone yet including Microsoft engineers that could explain why Windows does what it does without adding lots of ands, ifs, buts and maybe to the mix. You said you didn't defrag. Depending on how badly fragemented your drives are that may or may not make much of a difference. I wouldn't worry about it. Short of disabling the Swap File or Paging file depending on what file system you're running there isn't much you can do and to disable it actually hurts Windows performance even if you have 1GB or more of memory. Are you indexing any drives? That's the default state in XP for NTFS anyways. I turned that off almost immediately after installing XP.
williamconifer wrote on 12/16/2002, 11:55 AM
I found the Indexing Service in Computer Management but how do you disable it?

thanks
jack
Former user wrote on 12/16/2002, 12:02 PM
Indexing is turned on or off via the drive(s) property dialog window. Double click "my computer", then right click the hard drive in question. The indexing service switch at the bottom of the general tab.
williamconifer wrote on 12/18/2002, 10:22 AM
Well I figured it out. I had accidently dislodged my 500mb ram simm last time I worked in my case. That left me with only 256mb of ram. My task manager was telling me my total commited memory was at 650 meg. hehe. No wonder my disk was grinding!! Anyway I rendered the same file in 22 mins versus over an hour sans 500mb of memory. And best yet when I rendered with all my memory I nailed 100% cpu usage for the whole time!

BTW I found a 40+ page Word document from a German videography website that deals in tweaking Win2k for video editing (premier in their case). It is an excellent source of info. http://www.slashcam.de/files/TWEKWVE_2K_v_1_0.doc Hope this helps

jack