SuperFetch & Standby Memory Not Working Properly?

Faith · 05 Feb 2018

Updated October 2018:

From Wagnard:

Hi everyone.
Some of you may know me already as the maker of DDU (Display driver Uninstaller).
I decided to revive this old thread to let you know that I have made a little tool that can help you with gaming by purging the Standby list automatically when needed.
Feel free to try it out. It is available on my website @ wagnardsoft
It is named "Intelligent standby list cleaner" ISLC" in short.

Intelligent standby list cleaner v1.0.0.7 Released | Wagnardsoft

Updated February 2018:

Just a small update on this. It is a Windows bug. I called Microsoft and got hold to a higher tier engineer working for tech support and he told me it's indeed an issue with how the os retrieves data on certain hardware configurations from standby memory. At least they acknowledge it, but he couldn't say anything about a fix or how long I need to wait for a new update... He only mentioned that I can use the feedback app and give sys info. Yup... I need to wait until April - May then for a new feature update in hopes that it resolves itself. If it doesn't then I need to live with turning off SuperFetch and clear my standby memory once in a while, or revert my os.

__________________________________________________________

So there's a task called Superfetch in Windows that's supposedly should improve performance because it preloads applications in RAM. I read an article that games installed on a PC with 4GB or less memory may suffer from this due to its excessive load in/out behavior. My issue seems to stem from this service causing stuttering and overall bad performance in games, however I have 16GB of RAM... I can confirm this by either disabling the service or emptying my standby memory to free using empty standby list command. It looks like the task of fetching data from standby memory is more demanding than it should be for some reason. This can take a while depending on the game and how much free RAM I have, but usually the performance is good until Windows starts this bull.

I found the culprit in Windows 10, or more specifically the Creators Update - as Windows 7 and regular 10 didn't show the same symptom, even with SuperFetch running. I tried to reinstall the OS, do a complete rundown of clean drivers etc and the issue was still there. So, is this service broken in the Creators Update or what? I don't get it. Oh, and I have also tried diferent memory sticks, aswell as both dual and quad channels. More RAM will only postpone the issue.

Josey Wales · 05 Feb 2018

Do you use an SSD?

Faith · 05 Feb 2018

I only use SSDs. All of them are SATA though and not NVMe.

Josey Wales · 05 Feb 2018

I tried it both ways using SF and Not and I do not see any difference. I use a Samsung 850 Pro 256 GB SSD.

Faith · 05 Feb 2018

The standby memory needs to be full first, that's when SuperFetch struggles for me. Dunno why

eLPuSHeR · 06 Feb 2018

I have to do some tests too, but it seems Superfetch works properly for me. If you have SSDs you can try disabling Superfetch. You will probably don't lose that much.

Faith · 06 Feb 2018

Seems that these threads are related to what I have:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/t...eators-update/
Windows 10 Creator Update leads to frame rate stuttering and slow - Microsoft Community

All came out post Creators Update (coincident?). And one thread have over 600.000 views and almost 200 comments

And Microsoft did actually confirm an issue with stuttering on the Creators Update Windows 10: Microsoft promises to fix an ongoing game-stuttering problem | PCWorld and mentioned that a few fixes was on the way for the Fall CU, but that didn't work for me apparently since I'm already on that update. They also forgot to mention what these "fixes" did. I'm surprised that SuperFetch and the standby memory hasn't been mentioned more as I suspect this is the reason why users are having these performance problems to begin with. I'm no PC engineer so I don't really know for certain though. It's not unplayable, and some games doesn't show the symptom at all, but it's noticable enough for me, which may also be another factor why this isn't more widespread?

RoasterMen · 06 Feb 2018

You don't really need superfetch if you are using an SSD.

Faith · 06 Feb 2018

A moot point. The service is on by default and is only recommended to be disabled for troubleshooting. The point is that it should work just fine when it's enabled on my system, so I would like to know why it doesn't. Clearly something is not right with how data is being fetched from memory. Again, only on the creators update do I see this. I may try the latest insider builds, or wait for more updates I guess, unless someone have any ideas?

eLPuSHeR · 07 Feb 2018

RoasterMen said:

You don't really need superfetch if you are using an SSD.

Partially WRONG. I have noticed slowdowns even on SSD if Superfetch is disabled. And don't talk about disabling Superfetch for mechanical hard disks. I did a test yesterday (HD) and I noticed a huge performance decrease. I was monitoring memory using Resource Monitor and, after a while, the memory map was quite similar between both setups (Superfetch ON and OFF).

Also, Superfetch doesn't damage SSDs as many people wants you to believe. So, unless is working bad for you, I strongly advice leaving it ON all the time.

For OP: Do you have W10 up to date? Could it be some driver having issues? Chipset drivers up to date?