Processing Delays!?

[TaoPhoenix]

A few times I have noticed that certain apps pause while doing something, while Task Manager "swears nothing is going on".

Does anyone know of a tool that covers this?

Just now I loaded a couple of programs and got stalled, but Task Manager was indicating cpu activity near 10% or less etc.

I'm on XP, it happens at work on Vista too.

How can a program delay and Task Manager not know about it?!

[mouser]

This drives me bonkers.  It started happening on an XP install of mine and I could never find a way to identify what was causing it or to fix it.

I think the fact that it doesn't show up in the Task Manager cpu suggested that it is a low level system driver of some sort.

However, I strongly suspected it was caused by ESet antivirus/firewall -- the fact that it was happening always during disk access was one clue.

[TaoPhoenix]

This drives me bonkers.  It started happening on an XP install of mine and I could never find a way to identify what was causing it or to fix it.

I think the fact that it doesn't show up in the Task Manager cpu suggested that it is a low level system driver of some sort.

However, I strongly suspected it was caused by ESet antivirus/firewall  the fact that it was happening always during disk access was one clue.

-mouser (February 18, 2014, 08:18 PM)

I don't *think* I have Eset active (what even is that? It sounds vaguely familiar to something I thought I nuked a while back) - but it's popped up a few times. How can a stall not be processed by Task Manager?! ( I might have screwed up these quotes.)

[verszipo]

The problem is that if it's a drive access that causes the delay then the process itself is not using the CPU, so TaskManager won't show it.
You could try with an alternate task manager that shows disk activity too (i believe Process Explorer and Process Hacker both can show the disk activity, it is probably called "I/O activity", "I/O Delta Writes/Reads" or something similar).

In Win7 and Win8 there's a column in the builtin Taskmanager that shows disk activity too, not just CPU activity, don't remember if XP/Vista had the ability to show that data.

[Shades]

In both Process Explorer an Process Hacker, keep an eye out for the entry called 'Interrupts'.

This value should always be as low as possible, preferably not exceeding 1 to 2% even when doing a lot of reading/writing to disk. Because if it does, it is the first precursor of your drive failing. This is closely related for making Windows 'pause' without apparent reason.

[Vurbal]

Process Monitor can also show a good deal of useful real time information including file system, registry, and detailed thread activity.

[tomos]

In both Process Explorer an Process Hacker, keep an eye out for the entry called 'Interrupts'.

This value should always be as low as possible, preferably not exceeding 1 to 2% even when doing a lot of reading/writing to disk. Because if it does, it is the first precursor of your drive failing. This is closely related for making Windows 'pause' without apparent reason.

-Shades (February 19, 2014, 04:59 AM)

Thanks,
found this in the Process Explorer help:

Interrupts and DPCs
On Windows NT-based systems Process Explorer shows two artificial processes: Interrupts and DPCs. These processes reflect the amount of time the system spends servicing hardware interrupts and Deferred Procedure Calls (DPCs), respectively. High CPU consumption by these activities can indicate a hardware problem or device driver bug. To see the total number of interrupts and DPCs executed since the system booted add the Context Switch column. Another sometimes useful metric is the number of interrupts and DPCs generated per refresh interval, which you see when you add the CSwitches Delta column.