Windows 11 Laptop Very Slow?

[iamchemist]

I am running a split Access 2007 database at a non-profit Food Pantry. Previously there have been two Win. 10 laptops talking to a Win. 10 Desktop. Due to a laptop failure, we have had to introduce a Win. 11 Laptop (I3, 16 Gb or RAM) into the System.

We find that the Win. 11 Laptop runs fine immediately after it is booted up, but gets slower and slower (about 4X slower) over the next hour or two of use.

Based on advice from this Forum, the System has been set up to create a Persistent Connection, which initially speeded it up quite a lot.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on or how to fix it? I am pretty sure that rebooting the Win 11 laptop fixes the problem ttemporarily.

Thanks,

Ron

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Usually, the trick for this symptom is to see if you have a diminishing-resource problem. You say this problem occurs if the application is running for a time measured in hours. On the Win11 machine, you can trigger a launch of Windows Task Manager with CTRL-SHIFT-ESC and look at instantaneous resource usage as well as aggregate stats on critical resources.

On the Performance page, you are interested in CPU usage, Memory usage, and disk usage. If you have more than one disk, you should be able to see if either one is being more heavily used. on the Processes page, you should be able to see MSACCESS.EXE as well as its physical memory size.

What you are looking for is, over the long term,

• Any CPU increases in its usage until it saturates. A saturated CPU tells you that you have a computational problem. If you right-click on the CPU statistic, you can get the option to see logical processors rather than overall usage. That would identify a problem CPU.
• The "Available" memory statistic starts dropping.
• The "Disk Active Time" reaches 100% overall.
• The MSACCESS.EXE process memory size starts rapidly growing.
• The MSACCESS.EXE process disk usage ramps up very high and stays that way

It is very unlikely to see any of the first three or the last one. Process memory size COULD grow but I make no bets.

Another issue is that you have massive database bloat potential and it starts bloating (expanding rapidly in size). How often do you have to run a Compact & Repair on your database back-end OR front-end?

 

[Gasman]

I am pretty sure that rebooting the Win 11 laptop fixes the problem ttemporarily.

Best to make sure, else you could be going down the wrong rabbit hole.

 

[CJ_London]

I3 processors are quite slow and not really intended for regular multi tasking so I would also check what tasks are actually running in the background - my guess would be a lot more in win 11 v win 10

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I looked up the I3 processor, because I know it is part of a family of processors. Which KIND of I3 processor do you have? The 14K series, N300 series, 13K, 13KU, 12K, ...? Even within Intel's systems, there are levels of I3 that have anywhere from 2 to 10 cores, and their base vs. turbo clock rates vary quite a bit. The "K" processors have a mix of "efficiency" cores (low-speed, multi-thread) and "performance" cores (higher speed, single-thread).

The idea that the program seems to slow down could be that your virtual memory is getting bigger and you have started to do some paging or swapping. The "memory" column of the Windows Task Manager "processes" list would show you growth of task memory demands. There is a well-buried item that is part of the virtual page management algorithm that says when your process needs to grow in size, it has to inswap, deallocate space in the virtual memory file, then allocate the larger size, and then finally resume normal swapping. Unfortunately, I don't know how to get to the individual process swap rates to be able to tell if you are swapping.

@CJ_London - A multi-core I3 can easily multi-task since at least some of its cores will be multi-thread and an I3 never has less than 2 cores. The most common case is 4 cores, 2nd most common is 8 cores. It is true that Windows 11 has more processes, but there are ways to silence the background. Must be a couple of hundred YouTube articles on shutting down various useless processes. And, if you look on WTM, you see that most of the tasks are small and idle (0% CPU usage). I'm not defending MS or Win 11, we ALL know that Windows is a resource hog. It is just that I've already gone down that path and, other than turning off features you don't need, there is nothing there to cause the performance profile discussed in the OP's original post.

 

[Mark_]

@OP, what else is running on the machine? I've seen some odd issues lately when browsers are left open, say to play music. Once the browser starts taking up too much memory everything started going very slow.

 

[CJ_London]

- A multi-core I3 can easily multi-task since at least some of its cores will be multi-thread and an I3 never has less than 2 cores.

I never said it couldn’t. Just limited, certainly compared with its higher numbered co products. Would be useful for the OP to provide the same information for the other machine for comparison

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I never said it couldn’t. Just limited, certainly compared with its higher numbered co products. Would be useful for the OP to provide the same information for the other machine for comparison

The performance profile of "starts fast, ends up being slower" doesn't depend on the processor. That is more likely to be a software or resources issue.

For what it's worth, my big genealogy project exhibits that same symptom when converting 1.9 Mb UTF-8 files to ANSI text. I'm on an Intel I7 with some decent performance specs. In my case, though, it is that the back half of the input file contains longer records due to the nature of what appears in that part of the file. The conversion scanner has more to do in analyzing that section of the file. Also, I checked and the program develops bloat to the tune of 20-25 Mb per conversion. In this case, it's the price of doing business.

 

[xavier.batlle]

For an I3 processor some processes are a resource eaters, for example... Windows Update.
It's also very important the processors generation to understand its behaviour.