I have constant disk reads (and writes?) when I use Chrome to read my e-mail
and use Facebook. I used Process Monitor as you suggested, and the three most
often accessed processes were setupapi.dll, profile.ini in Firefox, and the
databases.db file in Chrome. I checked the setupapi log file, and it hasnât
been written to since April of this year. And I donât understand why anything
would be accessing my Firefox profile if Iâm not even using Firefox. Can you
give me some hints as to what to check next?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #26, I look at the way Chrome and other browsers update
themselves and how to diagnose this type of constant disk activity.
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Constant disk activity
The very first thing I would ask you is how much RAM is in your machine?
- Itâs very possible that the processes are simply struggling because of not having sufficient RAM.
Thatâs something that I just want to quickly throw out there and eliminate. Thereâs a good chance you have enough RAM. But, itâs one of those things that can cause disk reads and writes, excessive disk reads and writes, very quickly.
Log files
Now, as to setupapi.dll.
It depends on where youâre finding that setupapi log file. It may not be related to setupapi.dll at all. Iâm not familiar with setupapi.dll itself. Again, it depends on specifically where on your hard disk it happens to be.
Chrome Updates
If I had to make a guess: the Chrome portion of this makes me wonder if Chrome isnât doing an automatic update in the background. What most people donât realize (and itâs one of the reasons youâll never ever see an update request from Chrome) is that Chrome updates itself transparently (and more or less continuously) in the background.
You never have to actually download or accept an update. It just does it.
I know that last week that I happened to notice a fair amount of activity in Chrome, and in fact, Chrome itself seemed a little bit slower than normal. When I too fired up Process Explorer, what I found were processes for Chrome that were in the process of downloading a Chrome update and installing it.
Thatâs the kind of a thing that will probably resolve itself if you just let it run for awhile.
Look at your add-ons
Now, Iâm going to assume from this question that youâve done that and that this is a persistent problem. In which case, for Chrome, again, Iâd start to think about your add-ons and potentially disable those. So I would look at that.
Firefox
The Firefox thing is kinda of interesting.
Since youâve got Process Explorer running, I would look to see if there was a copy of Firefox running somewhere. Itâs very possible that itâs running and you donât realize it.
What I would recommend you do in a case like that is:
- First, kill off the process in Process Explorer.
- And then, see if that actually affects the writing to and from profile.ini.
Finally, you havenât said what email program youâre using. If by some chance youâre running Thunderbird, that could explain the Firefox accesses.
Firefox and Thunderbird share a fair amount of code under the hood. I donât have a specific, âThis is what happens,â but I could easily see Thunderbird causing accesses to files that are labeled as, or might look like, files related to Firefox.
So, those are the kinds of things I would look at next and just sort-of see if that gets you any further down the path to understanding why thatâs happening.
Next from Answercast 26 â Windows Media Player keeps crashing, what do I do?
I think there may be more going on that Chrome updates. I quit using Chrome because it consistently kepy my hard drive spinning. I use Internet Explorer and Firefox with no problem.
Even though there is Google Update in Startup, untick that and weâd think job done but not quite because they are also to be found in Task Scheduler.
There are at least two of them in there which say âevery dayâ and âevery day â After triggered, repeat every 1 hour for a duration of 1 dayâ. I disable those also.