TiWorker.exe driving me nuts - disc usage

rivre said:

TiWorker keeps chewing up my HDD today. It keeps popping up in my resource monitor, causing my HDD to make a ton of racket (it's a loud WD black drive). In task manager, I right-click on it and select low priority, but then a few minutes later when it pops back up again, it's set back to normal. What can I do to reign this in? I understand it's part of Windows update, but this is getting very annoying. I ran a full Windows update successfully just a couple weeks ago. I have the registry tweak set so that my wired connection is marked as metered so Windows update doesn't force updates at all the worst times. Also, since I read this is sometimes related to low disc space, my disc space is currently at only 23GB free as I've got lots of temp files stored on it until I back them up. I don't see why that should affect Windows update though.

Very hard to say for certain, but TiWorker is also used by scheduled maintenance. Part of that is to permanently apply older patches and compress the contents. It can go for some time. You can disable the Scheduled Maintenance job (not recommended), or just let it finish. If you try to corral it in, it's just gonna get back out. It's much worse on a HDD, particularly if the HDD is fragmented. Looks like it's just getting around to maintenance from last Tuesday Patches.

rivre said:

It's awful. My drive is pretty fragmented I'm sure. But it just won't stop. It's been chewing up my HDD all afternoon, every few minutes it starts up again.

Why does it keep changing to normal priority when I set it to low? It seems every time the process starts again it reverts back to normal.

This and "system volume information" keeps appearing at the top of the disk activity tab in the resource manager.

System Volume Information is likely the VSS writers maintaining temp shadow copies of the compression work going on. It gets a little complicated. It starts and stops because those processes are designed to run in idle time, and will pause or be suspended by the system when it detects activity (you). When it starts back up, it takes it's default priority....normal. It's painful on a HDD. You've got a decent cpu, I7 Skylake 6700k, so it's not process bound. You most likely have defrag set to auto, but it doesn't hurt to do it yourself occasionally. In the search field, type OPTIMIZE and choose the top entry, "Defrag and Optimize". It will show if you do have it set to auto, and there you can defrag it yourself any time you want to. Also, occasionally run the Disk Cleanup yourself.

Open and Use Disk Cleanup in Windows 10 Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials

Change Optimize Drives Schedule Settings in Windows 10 Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials

rivre said:

Thanks for the explanations. At least I have an idea of what it's up to.

You're welcome, sir! :)