Windows 10: Intermittent high disk activity on SSD - pagefile issue?

Not sure if I should post in this section or Anti-virus / security, but feel it's unlikely to be a virus issue so will try in here. I've recently noticed that the hard disk activity light is always busy, so I took a look under task manager to discover disk usage to be around the 90% mark and memory around 3.1 of 3.7gb used (4gb installed). I'm running Windows 10 on a 120gb SSD which only has around 1.3gb free. Funny thing is, the high disk activity / memory usage doesn't happen daily - just every few days. This pagefile sits at around 6.5gb on the root of drive C. When my system gets itself into this mode, it could take around 5 hours to sort itself out. I am however able to browse the internet and perform other tasks, but as you'd imagine, even starting up calculator could take time. Firing up Firefox could take 5 seconds. Viewing Disk details under resource monitor - with Total (B/sec) column in descending order, the 'image' culprits seems to be the following (with C:\pagefile.sys (Page File) under File column for each): svchost.exe (wsappx -p) Memory Compression svchost.exe (netsvcs -p) perfmon.exe MsMpEng.exe Does this just look like a space issue on the drive with windows trying to compress and manage resources? Takes a long time though. Disk activity is high whilst disconnected to the internet and no browser open, but I did notice a couple of weeks ago that the high disk activity only occurred when I had Firefox opened but not connected to the net. Any ideas?

:)

 

Intermittent high disk activity on SSD - pagefile issue?

It's very simple- you need to make MORE SPACE on your disk.

You do not have enough free space. I have given ways to recover some.

Post a screenshot of your task manager when your PC is running slowly similar to this:

 

Intermittent high disk activity on SSD - pagefile issue?

Thank you both for your replies.

It's just an aging i3 3320 desktop machine which I fire up for daily web browsing etc. Has 120gb SSD and 4gb of DDR3.

So it's safe to assume this level of activity is unlike to be virus related?

I had to shut it down last night after the pagefile / compression (?) activity continued for 10+ hours. On starting it back up today, it seemed to have continued where it left off, but seemed to have settled to normal disk usage after 30 minutes or so.

The high disk / mem activity is guaranteed to restart in the new 72 hours. I'd have thought if windows is managing the low space issue, I would see high disk / memory usage daily?

 

Intermittent high disk activity on SSD - pagefile issue?

1.3Gb is far too small an amount of free space. Try
Free Up Drive Space in Windows 10

And in particular use e.g. Wiztree (free) to look for, say, .wer, dmp, tmp files taking a lot of space after you've done some routine cleaning as per that tutorial.




I have no idea what your PC is- no specs given (click 'My Computers' below my post) - if you have a second disk, consider storing e.g. personal data on that.

Look for larger programs you don't need you can uninstall.

A 120Gb is somewhat small- these days there's not a great price differential between 120Gb & 256Gb disks.

Note that any Win 10 upgrade (every 6 months typically) requires around 25-30Gb free.

Memory compression is related to paging but not equivalent to it.