Explorer momentarily gets a bit laggy, i/o issue?

[cosmicklev]

Hi All,

I’m running Windows 2008 Server 64 bit Standard Edition on the following hardware:

Dell Precision T5400
1 x Xeon 5450 Quad Core @ 3Ghz
12 Gb ECC Quad Channel Memory
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512Mb (MSI NX8800GTS)
2 X 73Gb 15000RPM SAS Drives attached to PERC 6/I SAS Controller

The drivers (with the exception of the NVidia card, it’s running the latest vista 64 bit drivers from nvidia’s website) are all the ones that Windows detected and installed. There are no ❗ ‘s next to any devices in device manager which I thought was quite cool for a first time around install.

I’ve followed all of the steps described here and elsewhere regarding configuring Windows 2008 Server as a work station. One problem I’m facing is that when there is some (background?) I/O taking place, explorer gets a bit ‘laggy’, my mouse pointer moves in fits and starts and any tunes playing in media player or foobar 2000 get broken up.

It only lasts for a few seconds but it can be quite annoying. Prior to installing Windows 2008 I was running Vista 64 bit (still boots from another partition) and I had none of these problems. It’s as if explorer/foreground apps are being starved of either CPU or something somewhere is blocking I/O.

Examples of when this happens are:

1. Opening an RDP session to a remote server. Upon clicking ‘connect’ but before the RDP session window opens, explorer and mouse exhibit the lag behaviour during the RDP handshake.

2. If I open the Screen Saver settings in personalisation and then set the screen saver to Bubbles, the UI exhibits about 5-6 seconds of lag/choppy behaviour/broken up sound before it then renders the thumbnail animation.

3. Opening a YouTube video where the YouTube player initially shows it’s spinning logo when caching the .flv steam but before it starts playing anything (my ADSL is really slow so this can be quite noticeable).

4. Starting a VM in Hyper-V (RTM), there’s a 3-4 second period of loss of responsiveness/lag from the UI while it ‘powers up’ the VM to the VM’s POST screen, then after that it’s fine when it gets onto loading windows (i.e. there’s loads of disk I/O but UI smooth as a button).

5. When browsers (IE7 & Firefox3) are rendering images on pages that come from other websites. e.g. because your site’s PayPal button image is src=”https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif” when the browser opens a connection to get this image the UI, mouse and apps get ‘the lag’.

6. When UAC blanks the display (secure desktop I think it’s called) there is severe lag and it can take about 10 seconds to go from double clicking some admin type task icon (say ‘Computer Management’) to the screen going blank to eventually showing the UAC confirmation prompt. I’ve since disabled the ‘Secure Desktop’.

Generally I’m quite pleased with Windows 2008 and want to use it because I need to run Hyper-V so I can run virtual 64 bit OS’s (we’re rolling out 64 bit windows and unix to the platform, I need to dev, debug and acceptance test our apps against 64 bit environments now), Virtual Server 2005 R2 doesn’t support this.

Windows 2008 also runs Eve online (the only PC game I play) as well as Vista does (@1900×1200 and all the fancy graphics tricks turned on) but if a game performs some background I/O operation e.g. Eve logging me in then the explorer gets laggy and sticky until that completes.

If anyone else has experienced the same problems and got to the bottom then I’d love to know what you did.

One final question, how safe is it to install the manufacturers own Vista 64 bit drivers for stuff like the chipset, NIC etc on windows 2008 64bit ?

Cheers and thanks in advance.

Kev

[sawo]

This looks like driver problem to me.Do you have the drivers for everything fully installed?
About your second question – lets just say that its safe enough 🙂

[cosmicklev]

@sawo wrote:

This looks like driver problem to me.Do you have the drivers for everything fully installed?
About your second question – lets just say that its safe enough 🙂

Thanks for the reply. All the drivers installed correctly, but I’ll give the Vista 64 bit drivers a go.

Cheers
Kev

[sawo]

If your not using the Vista x64 drivers then which ones did you installed? Do you have x64 Server 2008 drivers for everything?

[cosmicklev]

@sawo wrote:

If your not using the Vista x64 drivers then which ones did you installed? Do you have x64 Server 2008 drivers for everything?

Windows 2008 x64 had drivers for everything straight out the box.

[sawo]

It depends on the hardware for example it didnt had drivers for my 2900pro ati video card and my asus p5k-se motherboard, not to mention that the drivers included in the windows itself are probably buggy and outdated.

[cosmicklev]

@sawo wrote:

It depends on the hardware for example it didnt had drivers for my 2900pro ati video card and my asus p5k-se motherboard, not to mention that the drivers included in the windows itself are probably buggy and outdated.

Yeah…I’ve learned about/been burned by the sub-optimal performance of MS generic drivers in the past. Anyhow, I’ve installed all the latest vendor Vista 64 bit drivers from Dell’s website (Chipset, NIC, Audio, SAS Controller, etc) and the problem remains the same. I’ve even binned the Aero UI in favour of windows classic which I would be happy to live with in the hope that it was maybe an Aero UI issue, but sadly not to be.

Annoyingly it’s hard to diagnose, I can’t even use task manager to take a cursory look to see if any particular process is hogging CPU because the UI is so choppy and task manager doesn’t get any refreshes.

Grrrr.

[omnikai]

I’ve been seeing this a lot too. The mouse kinda lags occasionally, especially when moving/resizing windows etc. In general it seems anything video-related is having trouble. I have the latest drivers installed for my Nvidia 8800GT, I think I grabbed the Vista x64 drivers. Should I be using the Server 2003 ones instead maybe?

I haven’t tested actual D3D performance yet, maybe it’s not working at all.

Really, it feels like I don’t even have drivers installed, the way that graphical changes are so slow. Video playback is ok, but with lots of vertical tearing on my second monitor (TV).

DxDiag shows that the nVidia driver is correctly installed and working.

[droplet]

@cosmicklev wrote:

@sawo wrote:

It depends on the hardware for example it didnt had drivers for my 2900pro ati video card and my asus p5k-se motherboard, not to mention that the drivers included in the windows itself are probably buggy and outdated.

Yeah…I’ve learned about/been burned by the sub-optimal performance of MS generic drivers in the past. Anyhow, I’ve installed all the latest vendor Vista 64 bit drivers from Dell’s website (Chipset, NIC, Audio, SAS Controller, etc) and the problem remains the same. I’ve even binned the Aero UI in favour of windows classic which I would be happy to live with in the hope that it was maybe an Aero UI issue, but sadly not to be.

Annoyingly it’s hard to diagnose, I can’t even use task manager to take a cursory look to see if any particular process is hogging CPU because the UI is so choppy and task manager doesn’t get any refreshes.

Grrrr.

Hi, I have had the same problems in the past (and I’m having them right now in Vista Ultimate 32). I remember that I solved the problem by installing the latest USB drivers from my MB’s DVD (Gigabyte). I will try this fix again today to see if the problems disappear under Vista 32.
You can really see the difference when you try to copy from external storage back and forth. Try copying sth to a external HD and see the speed. INstall the latest USB drivers and try again and see the difference. You will also see that the lag go away.
In my case it happens when I do a lot of I/O, e.g. using Vuze

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