Computer Hope

Other => Other => Topic started by: DaveLembke on May 31, 2018, 07:39:06 AM

Title: Heavy Hard Drive Activity - Very odd - 3 culprits - Microsoft Spy Program
Post by: DaveLembke on May 31, 2018, 07:39:06 AM
So I left my computer on last night and woke up hearing the hard drive going full tilt. My hard drive in this system is a 500GB Maxtor that has a loud chatter when it accesses data from the platters, and its so loud of a rumble that the case amplifies this sound and the computer on the hard wood floor can be heard downstairs in livingroom as a rumble in the ceiling above. Loudest healthy hard drive I have ever had.

Anyways I woke up today hearing a constant rumble and so I went to check to see what was going on and I found that the system was very lagged in responsiveness and after 2 minutes of waiting I got into task manager and saw that Firefox had something going on where it was gobbling up memory and the hard drive was running full tilt. So I killed off Firefox 60.0.1 and figured that would stop this heavy hard drive activity as it was likely hitting the hard drive with heavy paging due to one of 7 websites acting like a memory leak. But it didnt stop there.

The next service to hammer the hard drive was Service Host: Superfetch then about a minute or so looking into what this is, that was done doing something and then Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry was hammering the drive with activity saturating its throughput like the other 2 before it.

Moved on to this Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry and found out that its been reported to cause heavy hard drive activity when gathering information to report back to Microsoft about your computer and a way to disable it to stop it from hammering a hard drive as seen here: https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/windows-10-microsoft-compatibility-telemetry-high-disk-usage-solved/

The oddest thing about this is how 3 different things were being brutal to that poor 500GB Maxtor. The HDD LED was on solid and could have been doing that for most of the night, especially since Firefox 60.0.1 was stuck in a memory leak condition where it was eating up system RAM and hitting the paging hard. To this day I am really surprised that Mozilla hasnt gotten the memory leak issues under control with Firefox. When a website your at starts to gobble up RAM from a script with a memory leak, it should have a memory leak detection system in place to pause whatever is in a memory consumption runaway condition because websites arent suppose to do that. I have seen elsewhere with like IE and Edge where it will say this script has taken longer than expected to do something and then it gives the option to kill it off or continue etc. They should really have something like this that pops up and puts the brakes on to its abnormal behavior.

Below is a screenshot of task manager in reverse order. The first issue was Firefox memory leak, second was Service Host: Superfetch, and lastly was Microsofts Compatibility Telemetry hitting the hard drive heavy gathering information about my Windows 10 system to share with Microsoft without my permission.  ::)

So I am going to follow that link here and disable the spying of computer usage because while I have nothing to hide, I just dont agree to them openly spying on my computer usage, as well as why would such a service be so hard drive usage intense? How much information could they possibly be interested in that it means my hard drive is running full tilt, and I doubt its a hard drive benchmark that kicks in that would hammer a hard drive as heavy as it does  ::)  : https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/windows-10-microsoft-compatibility-telemetry-high-disk-usage-solved/
Title: Re: Heavy Hard Drive Activity - Very odd - 3 culprits - Microsoft Spy Program
Post by: Mark. on May 31, 2018, 07:54:30 PM
about 3 months ago I had a similar issue, unresponsive PC for no reason (although unlike yours, no heavy drive activity) and found this little utility, Easy Service Optimizer.
I ran it and it identified numerous Services that could be disabled, I did so and the PC is back to what an SSD should be expected to run at.

in case you're interested; https://www.sordum.org/8637/easy-service-optimizer-v1-2/
Title: Re: Heavy Hard Drive Activity - Very odd - 3 culprits - Microsoft Spy Program
Post by: DaveLembke on May 31, 2018, 10:34:24 PM
Thanks for sharing that Mark will check that out.  8)