How does Process Lasso determine system "Responsiveness"?

[Coldblackice]

How can I gauge what's killing my system's responsiveness? I keep getting system-wide micro-"hangs", where everything will hang for 2-4 seconds, before resuming and quickly catching up. This is continually happening, with no apparent source or cause.

What's odd is that even during hangs, mouse cursors in programs continue to visually blink as if they're unaffected by the hangs. But input definitely hangs, however -- if I type out a sentence, it will look like nothing's being input as the cursor just blinks, but 3-4 seconds later, everything gets rapidly typed out to "catch up".

I've scoured Windows 7 task manager, looking for rogue programs that are eating up mass CPU or memory, but there's nothing unusual! CPU usage hovers between 1-5%, with only 4GB out of 12GB RAM used. I've also closed most programs manually, but it still happens.

Now the clincher -- in Process Lasso, each time a micro-hang happens, the "Responsiveness" graph drops way down. So Process Lasso can see that the system is somehow choking --

How else can I determine what's causing the system responsiveness to drop like this?

How exactly does Process Lasso measure system "Responsiveness"? Perhaps knowing that will help trace to the source of this issue.

[hanemach_gt]

How can I gauge what's killing my system's responsiveness? I keep getting system-wide micro-"hangs", where everything will hang for 2-4 seconds, before resuming and quickly catching up. This is continually happening, with no apparent source or cause.

What's odd is that even during hangs, mouse cursors in programs continue to visually blink as if they're unaffected by the hangs. But input definitely hangs, however -- if I type out a sentence, it will look like nothing's being input as the cursor just blinks, but 3-4 seconds later, everything gets rapidly typed out to "catch up".

I've scoured Windows 7 task manager, looking for rogue programs that are eating up mass CPU or memory, but there's nothing unusual! CPU usage hovers between 1-5%, with only 4GB out of 12GB RAM used. I've also closed most programs manually, but it still happens.

Now the clincher -- in Process Lasso, each time a micro-hang happens, the "Responsiveness" graph drops way down. So Process Lasso can see that the system is somehow choking --

How else can I determine what's causing the system responsiveness to drop like this?

How exactly does Process Lasso measure system "Responsiveness"? Perhaps knowing that will help trace to the source of this issue.

I have also run across a problem similar to yours. In my case it was some badly written services (I won't name here) that were "choking" whole OS, what's more bizarre, with the responsiveness meter showing 100% all the time!

You might have read this in the FAQ, though I don't think it will give you more:

It represents the ability of the thread messages subsystem to keep up with thread/window message demand. The exact way we calculate this we don't publish, but its a pretty simple and accurate measurement.

[Coldblackice]

Shoot, thanks.

How were you able to diagnose and found those "rogue" services?

[hanemach_gt]

Shoot, thanks.

How were you able to diagnose and found those "rogue" services?

It was more of intuition than experience in my case, as I never had to dig into services that weren't consuming too much memory or utilize too many CPU cycles. I just ran services.msc, sorted the list the way running services were on top of the list, and started guessing. I really had no help except system services' exclusion (however, Windows Search service can cause glitches sometimes). It could be some hardware interference and/or circumstances that could be irreproducible.

One additional thing that may help you is trying to remember when "chokes" began to appear (after installation of some software etc.).
I strongly suggest you create a system restore point before playing with system settings, so services are.

[edkiefer]

what you can try is run MSconfig from run command.
First look at startup tab, see if anything that you didn't install or could have issue (you can easy disable it here or use autoruns (another good utility ) . You can probably disable most of the startup with few exceptions , Like I would leave any vid or sound driver for now ,can come back later .
Then go to services tab ,start with ticking hid MS services at first and again see whats running . note don't disable services here use service.mcs from administration tools utilities .
If you can't see any high usage with something like process explorer ,you just have to try disabling things that look like might be issue .
Maybe you could enable all log options and you can pin down whats running at time responsiveness goes down in PL graph .

[Coldblackice]

Thanks for the suggestions -- those are methods that I currently use (particularly Autoruns). However, it'd be useful if there was a way to "actively" poach out who/what is causing the issue, rather than trying to "carpet-bomb" it in a system-wide approach.

Not that that isn't useful, of course. I'm just trying to hone some more precise investigation methods/tools/approaches. I imagine that surely there must be some tool or way to gauge more precisely what would be causing system hangs like this...?

Are there other tools that could assist in gauging what the culprit may be -- and while it's in the nefarious process?

[edkiefer]

only other thing that comes to mind to check is hardware issues , see what system information shows on IRQ and conflict/sharing .
If you see a lot of sharing you might be able to disable things your not needed or using , some would be in bios , other like audio controllers can be disable  in Device manager if you have multiple ones loaded .

[BenYeeHua]

Try using LatencyMon, and I think this is a hardware issues.
Did you also using some monitoring tools? Try closing it, as I found some people report at the PlanetSide 2 forum that, their tick are unsync cause by their motherboard monitoring tools.

[Jeremy Collake]

The cause could be any number of things. Normally, there is some blocking I/O causing this. Maybe a blocking read or write to the storage medium, whether a page fault (page-in) or something else. It could be something else, but if it is a blocking I/O call that's hung up, then Process Lasso won't help.

Process Lasso's responsiveness metric does what it says - it measures the responsiveness of the Windows UI. Unfortunately, this won't tell you the cause - at all. All it is measuring, all it is seeing, is the exact same micro-lag that you're seeing.

[BenYeeHua]

Ya, maybe try to use the Windows Resource Monitor?
It can also be the hard disk issue, like the sata line has been broken etc.

[Jeremy Collake]

It can also be the hard disk issue, like the sata line has been broken etc.

I've always wondered how often this might occur. It'd be interesting to see if one can bend cables and artificially create disk slowdowns due to SATA bus transmission errors.

[BenYeeHua]

I've always wondered how often this might occur. It'd be interesting to see if one can bend cables and artificially create disk slowdowns due to SATA bus transmission errors.

Not for me, I only facing that it cause the whole computer hang, until I plug out the SATA line, and BSoD is coming for me.

[jeroen3]

To solve your kind of trouble you might be able to use xperf to see what is happening in great detail.
See step II in this forum post: http://www.sysnative.com/forums/windows-7-%7C-windows-vista-tutorials/5721-how-to-diagnose-and-fix-high-dpc-latency-issues-with-wpa-windows-windows-vista-7-8-a.htmldows-vista-7-8-a.html

It helped me solve my audio stutter problem due to CPU saturation even process lasso couldn't help.
Chrome.exe forkbombed so much that with SSD there is no spare time for the cpu to actually run the launched processes. Causing high dpc latency and audio dac undderun.