Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Sick and Tired of Machines Slow to Come Out of Standby

I am sick and tired of getting to work, docking my laptop - and not being able to do anything for 15 minutes.

This seems to happen when my laptop has been in standby overnight, and has not been connected to the network. Once it comes of standby at work it goes into a mode where the disk clicks madly, and everything runs like molasses, if it can be said to run.

Although the display comes up quite quickly, after less than a minute, nothing useful can be done for a much longer time. I understand that the folks who design things such as standby think that it is important to get the display up really quick, even if stuff is slow after that - byt 1 minute to display, and 15 minutes to useful work, is ridiculous.

It took 5 minutes to get to the point where my laptop started trying to enable the external monitor. 3 minutes more until my desktop was proper on external and internal monitor.

At about 4 minutes I ran CTL-ALT-DEL to get task manager. It took 3 minutes until I got the chance to press a button to get task manager, and 2 more minutes after that until I got to see the task manager.

Once I saw the task manager, I looked at top CPU consumers and PF Delta (recent PageFaults). I wish there was an I/O delta, but there does not seem to be. I swa processes such as the following:

scan32.exe
svchost.exe
cisvc.exe
naPrdMgr.exe
BESclient.exe
icdesk.exe
McScript_InUse.exe

It appears that most of the running and page faulting processes are related to virus scanning, with patching (BESclient) a close second.

I conjecture that the virusscanner's "cache" of recently scanned files has expired, and it is rescanning everything that needs to be open / which was open when I went into standby.

This sucks!!!