Myth Busted: Why Disabling SuperFetch on Vista and Windows 7 Is a Bad Idea
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March 3rd, 2010 written by Tibor in Myth buster
Let’s start this one off with a little, practical exercise. Are you with us? Good! Right-click on your taskbar, and select “Task Manager”. Now, take a good look at the numbers you see under the “Performance” tab. Let them sink in a bit.
This is unbelievable!
On a machine with 2 GBytes of RAM, how can there be 2 MBytes free? What’s behind all of this?
Even if you have twice as much memory, you will probably only have a couple of hundred MBytes available. This comes as an absolute shock to every computer user. While you’re only running a browser or listening to music, Windows Vista or Windows 7 consumes nearly all of your precious RAM. This fact led even Computerworld to pick up a Devil Mountain Software research study, claiming that Windows 7 maxes out memory and thus slows down the computer. To quote the research:
“On average, 86 percent of Windows 7 machines in the XPNet pool are regularly consuming 90 percent to 95 percent of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.”
Have you ever heard of SuperFetch?
The truth is—this is by design! Back in 2007, Microsoft introduced Windows Vista and one of its new features, SuperFetch, which is responsible for taking up as much of your computer’s memory as possible—albeit for a good cause!
- SuperFetch predicts which applications you will run next and preloads all of the necessary data into memory. It also does that with boot files. This helps prevent accessing the slower hard disk too often. The result? Programs launch much quicker, and Windows boots faster.
- SuperFetch’s prediction algorithm is able to determine which application users will open by a certain time of day and by a certain day of week. It is able to predict up to the next three applications that the user will launch.
- SuperFetch is smart—it prioritizes the programs you currently run over the background tasks, such as defragmentation. These tasks run when the computer is idle, but when they are complete, Windows SuperFetch populates the memory again.
- SuperFetch is dynamic—it adapts to your needs all of the time. So, if your favorite programs change over time, SuperFetch is able to quickly adapt to this.
Windows SuperFetch populates the computer’s memory with this preloaded information, to speed up programs and Windows features. So, what’s the benefit for you? Your favorite programs—for example, your Web browser, your media player and your e-mail application—are likely to start faster after a couple of days. Don’t worry, even if you install a new application, SuperFetch will not have a negative impact on performance. As soon as the new application demands memory, the SuperFetch data gets flushed. As far as this program is concerned, the memory is empty.
If you’re familiar with the Windows kernel, we recommend this interesting video from MSDN’s Channel 9. Michael Fortin from the Windows Performance Team talks about what Microsoft had in mind when developing SuperFetch and similar performance technologies. A little side note: Michael also talks about how a computer becomes slower over time due to the installation of a lot of programs (this is at about 20 minutes into the video). The TuneUp Blog team recently proved this theory in our post titled “How 200 Programs Slow Down Your PC“.
What happens when you disable SuperFetch?
Readers should know us by now. We don’t just talk theories; we test them intensely. So, we decided to disable Windows SuperFetch on one of our test machines and compare the performance of both machines. First of all, as expected, the Task Manager tells us that we now have about 600 MBytes of memory free.
This is bad! An important part of your computer is not being fully used. This is like having a 200hp engine in your car, with only 140hp being used. What impact did disabling SuperFetch have on our system? Boot performance went down immensely. Usually, this process took about one and a half minutes on our test bed; with SuperFetch disabled, boot time went up to exactly two and a half minutes.
We also compared the startup performance of a couple of applications, including Outlook 2010 Beta, which needed five seconds longer to start and navigating between folders felt sluggish. Launching even the very slim Google Chrome browser took about seven seconds, whereas the original test only took four seconds. This is not good.
Myth busted!
We can go on and on, but you get the point. Although we have more memory, performance actually noticeably decreased. SuperFetch in Windows Vista and Windows 7 is a good technology that helps speed up your entire system—and should not be disabled.
136 Responses to “Myth Busted: Why Disabling SuperFetch on Vista and Windows 7 Is a Bad Idea”
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February 7, 2011 at 8:38 am
There is one serious flaw with Superfetch. It only works if you have a reliable routine for it to follow, otherwise it will constantly try to populate the memory with programs it’s not even sure you’re using right now.
My usual routine changes from day to day – I never follow the same schedule as far as my PC is concerned. When i finally upgraded from XP to 7 i was thoroughly annoyed at not being able to leave the PC on when i go to sleep. On XP it was always perfectly silent, whereas on 7, when idle(!), the HD’s kept churning nearly 100% of the time. It took me a few days to track down the problem, and it turned out to be Superfetch.
From your description of what it does, it simply will not work for me. I have about 30 applications i use during the course of a week, none of which are on a schedule. Superfetch cannot possibly know when i will start up one app or another since that changes all the time! I think that’s why it had trouble staying silent when my PC DOES go idle – It keeps trying to guess, and in doing so, is producing constant wear on my HD’s.
For me, this service simply *does not work*, since it cannot predict my usage properly. Even *I* can’t, how can this service?
April 7, 2011 at 7:03 pm
I tested it almost 10 times. I attached a 1TB USB HD to the PC. Then I copied 2-10 Gb of data on it. (Nothing executable, 500-2000 Mb RARs, ISOs) Then I tried to detach the drive. All applications were shut, nothing touched the HD, the message was, cant remove drive, some program uses it blabla. And tried, and tried, and tried to remove the HD. In the moment I disabled the so glorius Supetfetch I can remove the drive. Additional info: The Windows Search service was already disabled at the beginning of the test. And no virus scanner were enabled on the system. I was definitely the SuperFetch.
This doesn’t fit with your desciption. The 500Mb RAR file is neither an executable nor a regularly used file. What does SF do with this and denies to detach the drive?
April 7, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Hi Tamasi G,
You have put forward a really good question, what does Superfetch do with you RAR file ! Well I think superfetch isn’t interested in your Rar file at all ! Instead it fell in love with your 1TB USB drive [ Oh so hot
]. That is, Superfetch used that USB drive as virtual memory. It didn’t even touch your files. So even if you had inserted an empty drive, the same thing would have happened ! And did you disable ReadyBoost? Try disabling it and check the results with an empty hard drive 8-). I will be looking forward to it.
Waiting for Tune Up Experts take on your topic.
Have a good day,
Jeet.
April 11, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Hi Jeet
good idea, but I don’t think that’s the problem. USB hard disks are way to slow to use for ReadyBoost. RB needs flash memory with very fast random read/write speeds. And you need to enable this explicitly!
@ Dezso: This behavior is not uncommon and I wouldn’t necessarily blame SuperFetch. When you copy files to your hard disk, the progress bar indicate that it’s done but in many cases it takes a while until the very last write operation is finished. Yesterday I had the exact same problem: I copied 14 GByte to an external hard disk. But even after the files were copied over, the ejection function wouldn’t work. It said “This drive is being used”. It literally needed another 20-30 seconds until I was able to eject it.
Maybe another program is responsible for the permanent file access: This could be a multimedia software that scans your files for multimedia content.
Make sure that ALL background applications are disabled and then re-run the test. Let me know what you find!!
Best, Sandro
April 11, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Yup Sandro,
You are absolutely right. If Tamasi could give an idea of the softwares he uses it would help a lot !
Looking forward to hearing from you TG !
Best, Jeet.
May 23, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Anyone using a computer that operates on batteries, either temporarily, or often, should avoid using SuperFetch. While it does keep popularly referenced application data in memory, the task of pooling all this into RAM, and flushing it if not needed is a waste of battery power.
The amount of battery loss due to SuperFetch is not very significant unless you are in the habit of bouncing between 10 different applications while running on batteries. But if your system barks for you to shut down with 5% battery power remaining, and unknown to you, Windows Update has managed to download a significant number of updates off a free WiFi access point, you are going to want as much battery power as you can get while it creates a Restore Point, and preps the updates (Think Service Packs!)
Why Windows allows a low battery system to proceed with an update event – by default – is beyond me. I run an older Asus netbook, and these events have taken the system nearly 8 minutes to completely shut down all open apps and do all the rest.
May 27, 2011 at 6:07 am
As soon as I close any program, Superfetch immediately tries to fill up that memory, which could take several minutes because of a slow laptop hard drive. During that time everything is slow, especially hard drive accesses, and the computer sometimes freezes completely until Superfetch is finished. It looks like nobody at Microsoft considered the effects of slow hard drives on Superfetch, as it blocks almost all other disk I/O.
June 1, 2011 at 3:43 pm
I run Windows 7 64-bit on RAID-0 configuration, with 8gb DDR2 RAM, Intel E8500 @ 3.7ghz. So my hard drive(s) isn’t exactly slow (6.2 WEI).
I have been having a services-tweaked install for a while, but always left Superfetch on. I did (and sometimes didn’t) disable the Search service because I’d much rather use something like the “Everything Search” soft to search for files/locations. Turning off Search, indexing, and some other things in my case helped reduce HDD activity. Moreover, I found that indexing and Search enabled didn’t help my computing situation at all.
Lately I have been experiencing a lot of random HDD activity, but I couldn’t directly explain it. It would be while surfing the internet (so I first thought it was a memory leak in the browser or something), but finally I figured out it was Superfetch working in the background.
I have a similar situation as the gentleman in the first comment, that my computer usage is random and varied. So Superfetch is of very little help to me. In fact, it is a hindrance as it makes my HDD’s work overtime for no performance gain whatsoever. After stopping Superfetch and setting it to “Disable” in Services, my HDD problems went away.
There’s much back and forth about the Superfetch issue, and of course there are many hardware and (more so) usage patterns that would affect Superfetch’s rightful place on any computer. But from what some people are saying about performance hits when starting up softwares, I find that simply to be untrue. When you boot into Windows, ALL programs take a bit longer to start up than if you ran them a second or third time. Whether you have Superfetch turned on or not. Now, having Superfetch disabled, I still get the very snappy program startups I am used to. So it is NOT like you’re starting up programs as though they are being started up for the first time after booting into Windows — but also starting up those programs after boot does not take longer than it used to on my system, when I still had Superfetch turned on.
What I’m trying to say, there has been NO performance gain for me by having Superfetch turned on, but there HAS been a performance gain (and less hardware taxation) by disabling Superfetch.
June 1, 2011 at 3:52 pm
So to title a post or article “Myth Busted” is not accurate at all, and actually sounds more reactionary on an emotional level than correct and widely applicable.
In situations where your OS drive is fast (whether a fast HDD, a RAID config, or SSD), and your overall system has a lot of RAM and good processor speed, I think it completely unnecessary to run Superfetch.
I further have my paging file set to a minimum of 512mb and a maximum of 2000mb. This is made possible by the 8gb of RAM of course, and also helps to reduce HDD activity for me. Disabling Superfetch now has also taken care of the random but aggressive HDD activity that had absolutely no benefit to me, whatsoever.
So I think my experience busts your myth that there was a myth to begin with
June 2, 2011 at 3:36 pm
Trala, I agree there is no “one size fits all” solution when it comes to Superfetch. However, I do believe there are way too many processes and services running simultaneously in Windows,to pinpoint random HD thrashing to SuperFetch alone. I’d suggest the following to all users who are in doubt on SuperFetch: Use Process Monitor from http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessMonitor.zip and watch what your system is actually doing during these hard disk operations. If you see thousands of operations caused by “SysMain” (which is SuperFetchs service name), then – by all means – turn it off. If it’s something else, then SuperFetch isn’t doing its work.
At any rate – on a extremely fast PC (as tralas), there is probably no noticeable benefit of having SuperFetch turned on all the time. I guess it would be up to the user to determine if he/she needs SuperFetch. On slower computers, I still suggest leaving it on – I have turned it off on some of my older test machines, only to discover that startup performance of applications decreased noticeably.
June 5, 2011 at 10:52 pm
Trala,
May I add another point of view? I have a DualCore Atom Processor netbook, with a GB of RAM. Now the only thing I do with it is to surf the internet and my machine is super fast and snappy . In this case, disabling or enabling superfetch won’t show any significant difference, and I am not even on an über fast machine ! So it depends more on usage then on machine configuration. Now let me give you another scenario. My dad has a Nehalem i7 CPU P.C. with 12 gigs of RAM & Superfetch is turned on. He uses Matlab heavily, and believe me, even that machine comes to its heels when opening large simulation files. I had once turned of superfetch and the experience was utterly worse. And yet that’s a ‘quite’ fast machine. So, my point is that your usage matters. It’s not about superfast or slow machine, it’s totaly comparative, it’s your usage, which stands as the standard of comparison.
Best, Jeet.
June 26, 2011 at 10:13 am
superfech = good for hosts bad for vm’s
July 18, 2011 at 5:41 pm
I was having blue screen problems with a newly upgraded laptop -upgraded from vista to windows 7 because I was fed up with it taking 30 mins to create a restore point and shutdown.
The blue screen would happened each time I opened Office 2010 Outlook immediately after logging in – Page File error. I have disabled SuperFetch and I haven’t had a blue screen since I disabled it. Any idea what is going on?
July 19, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Tom, can you take a look at “Event Viewer” and tell me the ID/event details/file name for the crash? You’ll find these more serious crashes under the “Custom Views/Administrative Events”.
If it’s caused by SuperFetch, you’ll see a reference to “sysmain” here. Confirmed?
Best, Sandro
July 21, 2011 at 10:48 pm
yes sub 1 minute boots are great, but not at the cost of 5 minute delay times between closing a program and going to open the next one. or alt tabbing between games and firefox…its totally uncalled for…I’m sure for structured people with small, fast hard drives this works just fine, but my 500gb beast with 100gb free makes superfetch feel like it needs to load everything!!
Don’t feel bad, even Mythbusters don’t get it right all the time.
July 23, 2011 at 5:11 pm
This entire SuperFetch discussion is hard to comment on. At some point in the future, I need to run a series of tests (on various machines/configurations) to get some serious results. I remember Microsoft – at some point – promised to publish a tool that shows the entire content of the SuperFetch (in real-time). That’d be great to find out if such delays are actually caused by SF or something else.
July 28, 2011 at 2:36 am
On a Lenovo T520 laptop, I starting having my CPU throttle up to 115% (overclock) every ~ 5 minutes – very annoying. Turns out that the cause was Superfetch. That bad boy is now turned off. When I start up an application for the first time, it takes a small bit longer. But on relaunching the application, it’s very fast. This seems fine to me – and how my PC is quieter, CPU doesn’t throttle, battery use will probably be longer. What were they thinking with this one?
July 28, 2011 at 2:42 am
I mainly use the PC to surf the web but it is was very slow. The hard disk kept churning away for 10 minutes on bootup. Why are you doing this I asked the computer? I started to use my mobile phone for browsing instead. When I switch off superfetch, all is well. The tech guys are too smart for us simple folks.
August 21, 2011 at 12:29 am
No, just no. I am sick to *death* of loading up my Vista machine and listening to the hard drive grinding non-stop for 5 to 10 minutes with truly horrible system performance. (Can barely even get a browser to load when superfetch is going mental). 10 minutes to a usable boot is *not* a performance enhancement. Superfetch = DISABLED!
September 9, 2011 at 12:00 pm
you say if superfetch is running 90% of ram will be utilized? Hmmm, I have superfetch running at the moment and I have 6 GB of memory and task manager shows I’m using 1.35 GB, must be superfetchs union break time now.
September 9, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Haha, absolutely
Well, I guess there is only so much data that you’re regularly using – and apparently it’s not exceeding 1.35 GB. Have a good one!
September 22, 2011 at 4:03 am
Superfetch overloads hard drive – it reads/writes constantly diminishing overall system performance. Those who disabled it can confirm the difference.
October 8, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Hello everyone
Just thought i’d reply to this as i’ve had major problems since upgrading my computer/OS. Went from Win XP (32 bit) on a quad core Q6600 with 4gb RAM installed to Win 7 (64bit) on a core i7 2600K with 8gb RAM installed.
After installing the Win 7 everything seemed ok but as i installed more programs i started having major problems and not being an expert i couldn’t work out why. I did several fresh OS installs, i thought certain drivers were causing problems, i had boot issues, my desktop froze approx 30 seconds after every startup but was fine in safe mode.
I googled how to fix this and found disabling services via “selective startup” fixed it. i enabled each process a few at a time and eventually realised there was too sevices which gave me the “frozen desktop” issue-
microsoft software shadow copy provider & superfetch
disabling these means no frozen desktop and i can operate my computer as normal.
an important thing to mention is that i use my computer to make music and installed A LOT of programs in a short space of time, i’m assuming the more programs i installed the harder superfetch was working (if what i’ve understood correctly) to the point of crashing my system.
i have around 40 programs installed so far.
I didn’t have any problems like this in windows xp and it’s been a long and frustrating few weeks until last night when things appear to be going ok so i’m hoping it’s fixed the problem forever.
October 22, 2011 at 1:57 am
finally i know what’s been causing the annoying HDD activity and lock-ups. apparently microsoft thinks it’s cool for a background service to hog the disk so badly that the entire computer becomes unresponsive for a few seconds every now and then, all for a few seconds faster loading times. guess what – the number of seconds lost GREATLY overshadows the number of seconds gained. not to mention how annyoing it is when flash or movies begin to skip for no apparent reason.
needless to say i turned this service off. i can manage my memory without help from a poorly thought out algorythm. if there’s one thing i cannot stand it’s a piece of software that thinks it’s smarter than me.
November 30, 2011 at 10:13 pm
@hellblade – this shouldn’t be the case; Win7 renices the superfetch process so that others have higher disk I/O priority. If your disk is getting stuck, I’d suspect another process with higher I/O demands, like your security suite. Or a crap drive / drive stuck in PMO mode.
As for turning the service off, why? What exactly do you expect that free RAM to do except waste electricity? It’s not as if it won’t get released when ‘real’ programs need it.
October 23, 2011 at 11:14 am
should be cautious for any bombastic marketing title such SUPER-fetch, READY-BOOST, SMART-update etc.. always turned to be crap stuffs trying to lure unknowledge/inexperienced user
November 8, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Hi all,
thanks for all your comments! Actually, we’re in the midst of writing up another blog post which answers some of your questions and actually solves problems with SuperFetch! Stay tuned for that one!
Best, Tibor
December 3, 2011 at 11:35 pm
myth busted Busted!
i have tried to believe in this post and tried very hard to increase my acer 4750G performance in gaming, including upgrading the RAM to 8GB. But it do me no good, the game runs sluggish (even the old rise of nations runs sluggish like hell) ..
after some consideration i decided to stop the superfetch and guess what?
no sluggish performance anymore?
i believe i would sacrifice that few seconds (3-5 seconds) better than experience lagging and sluggish performance while i’m playing games or watching HD movies.
December 14, 2011 at 7:55 pm
I have an Intel 510 120gb SSD as a startup disk, in win7. When I would click a window in different programs to gain focus, it would hang for a couple seconds. After research I downloaded Intels tool to optimize the SSD and they receommended turning SuperFretch off. i did so and more more hangs. Another reason why SuperFetch is bad.
December 14, 2011 at 8:15 pm
…I should say “No more hangs”, that would make more sense
December 16, 2011 at 1:33 am
While superfetch is a good idea in theory, in practice I just couldn’t stand the noise levels. Also, how can it be so slow? Sometimes, it spends 20 minutes reading a 3 GB vmdk file (you can see this in the resource monitor). The file takes 3 minutes to copy, i.e. reading AND writing in its’ entirety, so why does superfetch need 20 minutes to just read it?
Good idea, but completely botched in practice.
December 24, 2011 at 3:37 pm
If you have an “allways on AC” pc/notebook/etc and a certain rutine eg. banks/tickets sellers/accounting..etc then “maybe” sf is usefull. Personally on a 2.2GHz phenom q core and 8 GB ram i usually dissable sf, search and indexing,system restore and virtual memory…and yes i set the pagefile to 0/none…and guess what: hdd activity is kept at a minimum that way and windows responds more better when switching thru apps etc. Setting the pagefile to be small will end up wearing a small portion of your hdd.
December 28, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Hi all,
we’ve compiled a massive Q&A for all of your who are running into problems and see if they’re related to SuperFetch or not. Check it out:
http://blog.tune-up.com/tips-and-tricks/superfetch-problems-we%E2%80%99ve-got-the-solution-part-1/
http://blog.tune-up.com/tips-and-tricks/superfetch-problems-we%e2%80%99ve-got-the-solution-part-2/
Enjoy!
Best, Sandro
January 12, 2012 at 3:41 am
If you look at the physical memory percentage at the bottom of task manager, you can see that only 53% of RAM is being used, so there isn’t only 2MB free. Right above Free, it says Available – that’s how much isn’t being used. So, the article isn’t accurate.
January 12, 2012 at 1:05 pm
No, that’s the whole point of the article. Showcasing that while Windows says “2MB free”, it’s actually a good thing: Thats what Superfetch is about – using as much memory as possible. .
Available is the sum of the “cached” and “free” memory.
January 17, 2012 at 10:26 am
I completely disagree with this post! I had a problem where my svchost was using up too much ram, and it continued to steadily climb. I was litterly sitting there doing nothing while watching as it continued to climb, and my ram continued to decline. I was getting confused as to why my computer kept shutting off and rebooting. It would take a few hours before it would happen each time, but it still happened(and in the middle of playing a game or researching on the internet.). I looked up what may be the problem, worried that it was a virus(I had a virus where the SVChost.exe did the same thing, only worse. Not to mention I couldn’t do windows updates or surf forums to figure out how to fix that problem(windows xp). Of course, after going through all that, I was worried. I also read it could be my power supply. Then I read about disabling SuperFetch. I disabled it like instructed, and I HAVE NOT had one problem since. My computer runs the way it should, and my ram isn’t being eaten all up by some svchost.exe thing. I don’t know much about computers I’ll admit, but I do know there is a glitch somewhere in the SuperFetch w/Windows 7…I have no idea about Windows Vista.
January 18, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Hi Corrina, as stated above it is actually normal for SuperFetch to use memory. It populates your RAM with data that is needed frequently so it’s “ok” if svchost.exe (which is a process behind SuperFetch) consumes a lot. The moment your applications demand memory, it is immediatelly freed up.
Can you tell me how much RAM SuperFetch ate up? Does it happen again if you turn SuperFetch on?
Best, Sandro
February 18, 2012 at 3:38 am
Superfetch = full ram used = lag
- Superfetch predict what processed we need to use next. But that is prediction.
- What if running process needs more ram? wait for flushing?
- What if more than one process need more ram? flush, fetch flush,fetch??
Superfetch waste more time and cpu. I disabled superfetch on my friends’ laptops and they stop lagging. “If you car has maximum 200hp and you are using only 140hp, that’s good, you save more fuel and have more power left to use”
February 26, 2012 at 7:32 am
There is a reason I always disable superfetch on a fresh install. When it works right its great, but it doesn’t take long to screw up. Just today (in fact an hour ago I just solved it) I was trying to render a vid. I would get to maybe 10% then seem to lock up for 15 minutes +. PC totally unresponsive, except timers and things were still running. I finally got the bright idea to open the resource monitor and watch what was happening.
superfetch would go nuts every time I would try to start rendering. It locked the disk at 100% active time and nothing could use it. When it finally decided to let something use a few bits 20 minutes later, I quickly went in and stopped it and disabled it. BAM! suddenly everything is back to normal and the video finished rendering 5 minutes later. This is on a week old install. Why it feels the need to load up every file on disk is beyond me – you can see what it is doing on the resource monitor in Vista, not sure about 7.
I tried to give it a chance this time (or maybe I was just too lazy to disable it). But it always has caused problems for me and looking at the comments here, many others.
Just disable it to save future headaches.
March 9, 2012 at 2:22 am
Superfetch = Crap
Your test is flawed.
March 13, 2012 at 4:06 am
i dont care a bout Vista IT was changed in Win7
if you have plenty of memory Superfetch is awesome. instant app loading
YOU guys NEED to watch the video from the guy that made superfetch and what it does and what it doesn’t
There is no point in having 20gb of unused memory it makes total scene to fill the memory with stuff you may want to do in the future
March 25, 2012 at 6:59 pm
I disabled prefetch, superfetch, clearpagefile, and largesystem cache. Then I pinned my most-used apps and my system is a lot faster now. YMMV.
April 7, 2012 at 11:26 pm
@TheGooch: I couldn’t agree more! I did exactly the same as you. Maybe this ‘guess work’ only helps to sell more machines.
All the best.
April 20, 2012 at 3:47 am
The myth is, that X% of your memory isn’t being used, and so your computer is under – utilized by turning off Super Fetch. But its smoke and mirrors, because if you turn it on, your hard drive gets thrashed… “Over used”… as the system guesses all the time what program you might use next, and loads it into memory that has been emptied.
Imagine you have a program running, that when you’re on a webpage, it will scan it for links, and pre load all the pages of those links in the background… so that if you do click one… WHAM, fast, the data for that page has already been prefetched, its a snap to display that page.
On the surface, it looks like you’ve speeded up your webbrowsing, and perhaps you have. What you’re not seeing, is all the extra traffic and bandwidth your computer is now eating up, prefetching all the pages the algorithm is guessing you might click on next, but never do… there are hundreds of pages on a link.
In some few sceanios, like stupid pc illiterate home computer users (the bulk of the masses), Superfetch works great… only a few Apps you use, over and over and over again, or on a network server that is always accessing the same static database or running the same few programs. For other power users, on the other hand, fire up a game, load hundreds of webpages, crank up their video editing software, run a virus scan, and this, and that, and everything under the sun, there is no common set of programs they use over and over again, that can all fit in the unused memory. In fact, within 5 minutes, most of them have already filled up all their used memory, and regular Windows disk caching takes over and manages it all pretty good.
So unless I have a compelling reason to turn it on, on a new PC the first thing I do is disable that disk thrashing SuperFetch, as well as the Search Indexer, both of which are horrid. They are suppose to work at idle process in the background, but even so, while thrashing that disk, you can’t use that disk for anything else… and they don’t just stop ASAP as soon as you start to work again….
May 15, 2012 at 2:58 pm
I have a couple problems with this article.
First, the title is misleading. When you say “Myth Busted: Why Disabling Superfetch… Is a Bad Idea,” the title implies that the myth is that it’s a bad idea to disable SuperFetch, but you are going to explain why it’s a good idea.
Second, SuperFetch is causing my Disk Use to be 100% active for quite a long time every time I boot up. The simplest programs give me a “Not Responding” error. Even 5 minutes after booting, trying to run Firefox takes nearly 5 minutes for it to load.
SuperFetch seems like SuperCrap to me.
May 16, 2012 at 1:37 am
“Readers should know us by now. We don’t just talk theories; we test them intensely.”
Yeah, only you didn’t. You did a very limited test in a non real usage situation and concluded from that. That’s why makers of this superfetch thing think it works well. But if you have a machine with dozens of programs you use all the time you computer is a lot slower and the gain is negligible.
This superfetch feature was thought to please grandma to fire up internet explorer faster. For people who really push their machines with games and applications this feature just trashes your HD to no end. Your PC just doesn’t idle. It is always trying to “guess” what you are going to use, even when you don’t use your pc for hours.