System Freeze

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Almost every time I come on here, my PC freezes--I have to turn it off to get out of it and now my security system has to be run after I've been on here and there are always threats removed now, 10-34 with each session! And I have to run the clean up program, my browser has had over 3,000 items after being on here a few minutes! This only happened after the new CF came in. I did ask about it. haven't heard from anyone yet. I had this problem before and complained, they did something, can't remember and it got better. I know it's not my computer, it was ok before this change and I got a new oneas few mths ago.

No problem here. Probably because of heavy javascript.

• Clear browser cache.
• Make sure browser is updated.
• You could try a different browser for comparison.
• Or run your browser with a clean profile or with the extensions turned off.
• You could turn off script for the site, but that will probably neuter the site.
• You could post to http://www.christianforums.com/forums/questions-about-cf.881/ which gets more traffic.

I agree with Paul that a lot of the sludge is due to the browser-heavy code: JavaScript and who knows what else. Coding practices in the past 10-15 years have headed right down the sewer pipe. ("Kids today," etc., who know nothing about resource allocation/management. Appearance uber alles.) Web sites that have appeared in the last 5 or so years would've been laughed right out of code review when I was doing full-time I.T. The older CF interface, which you can choose over the newer one, feels a lot lighter, so give that a try and see if it fixes things.

For a web page to freeze a whole PC (the running process is un-killable via Task Manager if the platform is Windows) -- that makes no sense to me. I suspect something else is going on with that system. Could be any number of things. "Any number of things" could be a higher number if the platform is Linux and the browser is, shall we say, "on the periphery of things," i.e. not IE or Firefox or Chrome or Opera or Safari, because probably not much testing has been done with those (and they may not even be standards-compliant).

Also with a big memory footprint, the browser might be going places in memory that no browser has gone before, and hitting a corrupt memory location (due to a defective memory SIMM/DIMM). That could lock up a browser depending on where in the browser code the memory corruption occurred. Run a memory diagnostic and see what you find. (But run a real one, not the fake one that you enable in the BIOS to run at boot time. Those typically find nothing, even when there's a problem.)

Another possibility: If the new page code is consuming so much memory (or your PC doesn't have enough memory to start with!) that it's causing your PC to start paging out to disk, and if a swapped-out page happens to go to a disk block that's corrupt, that'll cause a problem when the page is pulled back in by the memory-management code. So, try running a disk check on your PC, and tell it to fix any errors it finds. It will take a long time, depending on the size of the disk, so do it when you're sure you won't need the system for a few hours.

Finally, all the commonsense stuff: Make sure your operating system and browser are running all the latest patches, and make sure you're not running anything (operating system or browser) that's no longer supported. Also make sure you're running an anti-malware product that actually does something useful and has a good reputation. There are sites that evaluate them for effectiveness, and can help you pick one worth the money. Do not cheap out on your anti-malware package.

FWIW, CF's new interface has been fine here on Win 7 and IE running WOT and Adblock, on various vintage PCs, running anywhere from 2-8 GB. Also Norton Internet Security. No hangs, no unexpected slowdowns. Lest anyone blow a fuse about the Adblock deal, one of the most common vectors for malware these days is ads on web pages. Any I.T. work I do for a shop, I insist every system run an ad blocker or they can look somewhere else for I.T. support. Too many ads sneak past the people who are supposed to check them for legitimacy and keep checking. (If there's any checking going on at all.) No implications relative to this particular site intended; I just play things safe, and that's not going to change now or at any time in the future, unless God puts up His own web site, and then I'll make an exception. If infections were just little fishies swimming across the screen like they were 20 years ago, I wouldn't be so strict policy-wise, but these days a single infection from a single click can seriously ruin your life. I've got enough going on already, amen?

Hope this helps.

Just occurred to me that the OP is talking about a phone and/or a tablet. If he's using a CF app (if there is one), try accessing the site via browser. If he's using a browser, try accessing the site via a CF app (if there is one).

Also I can envision an earlier, memory-limited phone/tablet getting throttled by some of these "heavy" pages.

And finally, SSD-based devices like phones & tablets will eventually succumb to block wearout. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the leveling algorithms have gotten better, but it's still just a matter of time. (Time, of course, depending on how the device is being used.) Could this be related to the OP's experience with CF's new front end? Long shot, I'll be the first to admit. But conceivable........

Sorry for the thread drift, but Bass, are you a fan of keeping Win7 page files on SSDs?

Uh-oh... That's one of those "it depends" -type questions.

Ideally, for performance, you'd never do a page-out. In the real world, however, there will be some. And so the first thing I'd do would be to max out system memory and then pin the pagefile size to the minimum size required to hold a dump file, and don't let that size deviate from what you specified. I think that's somewhere around half a gig to a gig for Win 7 running a reasonable amount of main memory. Try 500 MB for both min and max, and see if Windows throws a warning when you save the config.

If you're already at max system memory and you're still paging out (as evidenced by taskman or perfmon), my belief is that simply the process of paging out would swamp any advantage an SSD might have over a spinning disk, or vice-versa. (In terms of memory management for performance, including cache optimization, paging out pages of an active process is like dropping a hand grenade into a barrel of oatmeal.) However, SSDs are cheap enough today to warrant trying both and seeing which works better. Personally, I think if you're going to be regularly hitting the pagefile, having it on a separate disk is far more important than whether that disk is mechanical or solid state. And the other thing is, mechanical disks have gotten pretty durn fast recently. Now... if you want to get really slick, try this for a page file: a RAID-5 set with three fast 2.5" drives, with writeback cache enabled. Yeah, I've done that, for a site that was having database-performance issues that the vendor couldn't figure out. (Defrags and index rebuilds had done nothing to improve matters.) Speed-wise, file that sucker under "Yikes!"

Is this the info you wanted, or did I go too far down a rabbit trail?

That's great. You've added some dimensions I hadn't heard of or thought about. I suppose you prefer a separate drive for paging because of SATA pipelining limitations, if that's the right term?

I have a 32 bit setup, so I'm at the 4GB limit. I swapped in an SSD (Kingston) not long ago and am very happy with it, but I sense a slight drop-off of late, though nothing serious. I had the page file on the D drive at first, but a couple weeks ago moved it back on some advice. Now I'm thinking of returning it to D:.

I do some light video editing, but most everything is Office/browser related. So I don't think my paging needs are great. Thanks MUCH for the insight!

Paul

paul1149 said:

That's great. You've added some dimensions I hadn't heard of or thought about. I suppose you prefer a separate drive for paging because of SATA pipelining limitations, if that's the right term?

Click to expand...

Hey Paul, my far bigger concern is actuator contention, especially if the pagefile is located quite a distance away (spindle to edge, not radially) from the files the application is accessing. This is where you can start to see disk queues lengthen because the actuator has to move the heads back and forth as fast as the mechanics will allow in order to access two files "at once," or in parallel if you will. Delays due to mechanics are what you lose when your pagefile resides on a separate disk. In my old VMS days, we used to be able to place a pagefile where we wanted on a disk: outer, center, or inner. If you chose correctly, it could really keep seek times down. That's how serious we were about actuator-related delays. (Of course, it was installation-specific.) Yeah, lots of times we did have to page out, since memory was ungodly expensive back then. You could buy an expensive BMW today for what ECC memory was going for back then and what would now come on a couple of ECC DIMMs for a couple hundred $$$.

I have a 32 bit setup, so I'm at the 4GB limit. I swapped in an SSD (Kingston) not long ago and am very happy with it, but I sense a slight drop-off of late, though nothing serious. I had the page file on the D drive at first, but a couple weeks ago moved it back on some advice. Now I'm thinking of returning it to D:.

Click to expand...

I sort of envy you, 'cause I have a couple of systems that are 32-bit (OS) but limited by the motherboard to 3 GB. Dang. I could really use that extra gig.

Are you sure the performance drop is due to the swap drive and not something else? Have Task Manager's resource monitor running, disk section, while you run your workload. Check for any disk queues and on which spindle (C or D) they're appearing on. CPU well under 100% and a disk queue of, say, 2 or greater, probably means actuator contention. You may find it's not the pagefile throttling things, but rather some other file, like maybe some temporary file the video editor sets up at the beginning of an editing session. If you can find out what that file is, try moving that to the SSD. You should be able to find out from the documentation what temp files the application creates and hits hard during editing. There might be some setting inside the application's preferences that lets you specify where to put temp files and how to name them.

Oh, something else I just thought of, but this is really getting into the "last 2%" area: Watch out for a fragmented pagefile if it's being accessed a lot. If it isn't getting hit too often, then not to worry. You can check it with a 3rd-party defragger like Auslogics. Contiguous=good, fragmented=bad. (But again, only if it's getting hit a lot, 'cause a fragmented file that's never accessed won't cause performance issues.)

Also, watch out for the usual gotchas: Don't have indexing enabled on any drives, don't let any defragmenters run automatically, don't let your AV program fire up scheduled scans while you're editing, you know... all that junk.

Good luck with your system!

Thanks much once again. I only have some of my user profile indexed on C drive, the rest is on other drives, and it's not much. As far as the rest, I think I'm ok, but I will definitely hold on to your posts here for future reference. I do use Auslogics, AAMOF, it's my fave defragger short of the commercial PerfectDisk. I ran a speed test on the SSD and it still looks strong. There is the possibility that Windows is acting up, as MS has had some very dubious updates lately, so much so that I'm no longer auto-installing.

Appreciate your insights! Blessings.