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I have a performance issue on my Windows 7 (64-bit) machine (Win 7 Professional), and it causes a definite slow-down that is most noticeable in Process Explorer (previously of Sysinternals).

The machine is generally left switched on. When I first log-in everything is fast and responsive. Launching Process Explorer is almost instant (1 second max). The data updates without noticeable delay, and switching to administrator mode in Process Explorer (File...Show Details for all Processes) is similarly quick (a second or two for PE to close and re-open).

Over the course of 6-7 hours, the machine gradually seems to get less responsive. Even after I have closed ALL open programs, launching Process Explorer will now take multiple seconds. Switching to administrator mode can take 10+ seconds). When it does re-appear the window is painted very slowly - only one row per second is drawn in the application window.

Killing and re-starting the explorer.exe process does not seem to have any affect, and this is a fairly standard workplace machine with no customisations. It is running WebRoot antivirus.

CPU, temperatures, and network and disk activity are all showing as roughly "idle", so I'm a bit stumped. My guess is that it looks like some sort of locking problem - as if a shared resource somewhere is contended and being held by an errant process for too long, causing a performance degradation without high CPU usage.

Logging out and logging back in cures the performance problem - everything goes back to being responsive.

So - the specifics of my question:

  • What windows resources does Process Explorer use/depend on that could be so contended or so busy that I notice a performance degradation?
  • What diagnostic tools / procedures could I use to try and find the root cause?
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  • Install the WPT (part of the Win10 v1511 SDK: go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=698771 which is the last version that works in Win7), run WPRUI.exe, select First Level, CPU, DiskIO, FileIO, Resident Analysis and click to start. Minimize the GUI and run it till you see the slowness again. Now bring the Window back to front, click on Save to save the data into a ETL file. Zip the large ETL file into zip/RAR file, upload the zip (OneDrive, dropbox, google drive) and post the share link here. Sep 21, 2016 at 15:24
  • Well, this is annoying. Sort of. I downloaded the excellent UI for ETW, which downloaded and set up the required performance tools. Tried doing some test traces and then waited from the performance problem to re-occur so I could trace what was going on. Except it hasn't. Performance is now fine across the whole day. Machine is snappy and responsive without any problems. Possibly something was a bit messed up with performance instrumentation and installing the tools fixed it? Don't know. Bit annoyed I didn't get to the root of it.
    – David
    Sep 23, 2016 at 7:18
  • Try it several times again. THE next days I don't have a Pc so I can't look at the file Sep 23, 2016 at 16:50
  • were you able to capture a trace of the slowness? Oct 2, 2016 at 20:55

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