Windows 10: System and compressed memory slowing down disk operation

I have win 10 64-bit home on a 4th gen core -i5 laptop. I have a WDC 1T 2.5" USB3 drive. It is about half full. It used to do 60-70MB/s write speed. Since a few days ago, I noticed it has slowed down by a factor of 5-6 to 10-20MB/s. While copying large files, I watched what's going go. The System and compressed memory process was doing a lot of read and write on the disk. If the copy speed reported by the dialog is say 15MB/s, then system compressed memory process is reading 15MB/s and writing 30MB/s. It looks like this process is reading back the content written and writes back. It is consistent over reboot with several large files from 200MB to 7GB in size. A couple of weeks ago I did a file backup. I created a 5GB virtual drive on my SSD and dumped all files to be backed up. Took only 5 minutes to copy the 5GB files to the virtual drive and copy the file to the WDC disk, at around 67MB/s, typical of this type of portable drives. While I was wondering what was going on, I tested the same files with a USB3 dock and a 2TB Seagate drive. Write speed is about 150MB/s. So I thought it was not a problem with all disks. The WDC drive has no compress to save space option, BTW. I wonder what's going on. I have AVG antivirus and I turned it off while copying and same slow 15MB/s speed.

:)

 

Can I end my system and compressed memory NT Kernel & System

System and Compressed memory occupies a big portion of my ram. This is slowing my system down and decreases performance. Is it ok to end this task to free up the memory it is taking? Thank you for your time.

 

System and Compressed Memory

In Windows 10, "System and Compressed Memory" is holding a compressed copy of other process' memory as one last stage before it is paged out to the disk. It's a new extra layer of caching. If another process is using tons of memory -- as Warcraft was
in your case -- this process is going to be holding some memory on that process' behalf. Closing the process will cause "System and Compressed Memory" to go back down.

 

Found solution here:

Windows 10 high Disk usage (100%) I've seen a thread here explaining how to fix it but I seem to have lost it... : techsupport

First reply worked for me. What a royal screw up MSoft?!

 

Thanks, useful. Note that System and compressed memory problems are only very occasionally reported here, and there seem different possible triggers. However, could be useful for a couple of people currently reporting such high disk use they don't know what process is related.

 

Worked for me also thank you.

 

Oh, that makes sense! I've just turned off lots of notifications I don't need/use. I haven't tested the difference yet but I'm confident this will make a big difference.

Thanks *Smile