Calling Windows Experts

[andrewducker]

My machine is being _really_ slow for the past week. Checking the task manager tends to show that the actual processes are taking a percentage or two - but that the kernel times are at at least 25%. Is there any way of telling what's sucking up all of the kernel time?

Comments

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

It is slow all the time, or are you experiencing "spikes"?

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

This is spooky, my laptop has been struggling for the past week too - especially noticable when I'm streaming stuff across my network - Everything has a little hangtime and goes into buffering mode - It's a pain when watching avi's as it's stop start etc. I've closed down processes on the laptop and been blaming my router but I'm wondering if the Microsoft folk have issued an update which is causing slowdown - Do you have automatic Windows Updates enabled?

[darkoshi]

Where does it show kernel usage in the Task Manager? Is it a certain task name?

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Time spent in the kernel is still accounted to the process that's causing the kernel processing: each process's 'CPU time' shown in Task Manager is the sum of its kernel and user times. So fing the process that's using more than 25% of your CPU, and that's your man.

Unless the kernel activity is entirely unrelated to any process, which I didn't think was possible in NT as "everything else" is swept into ntkern. Or so I thought.

Task Manager doesn't give much information, much better is sysinternals' Process Explorer, which should let you track down damn near anything, it'll even tell you precisely which services are running inside those pesky svchost processes (although, obviously but still frustratingly, it won't tell you which of those services is active).

You did mention USB, so that's a likely culprit. You can use the performance monitoring whatsit in the system console to check if there's any background I/O to your card reader that you didn't explicitly know about.

PS. I hereby explicitly state that I am not in any way shape or form a 'windows expert' ;)