Business Innovation Homepage > Infrastructure Optimization
Tips on finding and weeding out system performance hogs, optimizing memory,
and restraining Vista's features will make your system soar.
InformationWeek
January 7, 2008
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iTunes is one example of this. If you use iTunes, you should disable indexing of the iTunes Music Library folder. In Windows, this folder is %userprofile%\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\, which has the file iTunes Music Library.xml in it. If you have a lot of music in iTunes, this file becomes quite large, and every time it changes, the Vista indexer will attempt to re-crawl the whole thing from scratch and waste a lot of time. Since there's no particular reason to index this file, it can be excluded.
On the other hand, there are programs like AIM 6, which can write logs of chat sessions to files in the Users directory. I have the crawler turned on for the directory where my instant messenger chat logs are saved, since I want them to be searchable.
If you want to disable Vista search entirely, go to Services (in Control Panel's Administrative Tools), double-click on Windows Search, hit "Stop," and set the service startup type to "Disabled". If you have Outlook 2007 installed on Vista, note that the enhanced search function in Outlook uses Vista's indexing, so if you fire up Outlook with indexing disabled, you'll get a warning about it. You'll still be able to search e-mail -- but e-mail searches will be very slow. Also, any other programs that depend on Vista search to run may balk, so be mindful that you've done this. Of course, another way to "disable" Vista search without actually disabling the service is to just uncheck all the directories that are crawled, which has fewer potentially unexpected side effects.
If you use the Start Menu's search box to only search for programs by name, not e-mail or files, you can speed up the search results by changing the search box's behavior. Right-click on the Start button and select Properties -- Start Menu -- Customize, and uncheck the options "Search communications" (i.e., e-mail) and "Search favorites and history," and under "Search files" select "Don't search for files." This cuts down on the amount of time needed to return results, and you can always use the main Search menu for a more inclusive search.
There are two basic tweaks you can make to System Restore: changing the size of the System Restore repository, and changing the System Restore schedule. The first affects how much space is set aside on any given disk for System Restore. The second affects how often System Restore runs in the background.
System Restore has been designed to run as efficiently as it can. Still, on machines that don't have as much spare I/O capacity -- notebooks, or some computers that only have one hard drive -- things can slow down when System Restore kicks in. My solution in such a case is to set System Restore to run a little less often -- or, on a non-critical machine, disabling it entirely. On my notebook, for instance, I have a relatively small System Restore repository, and I set it to run only once a week. This machine almost never has original data on it anyway, so if something goes wrong it's not a major loss.
To change the amount of space set aside for System Restore, you'll need to edit that volume's Shadow Copy storage space, which is where System Restore information is kept. Launch an elevated command prompt and type:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=[drive] /maxsize=[size]
where [drive] is the drive letter that you're changing the size of the Shadow Copy storage space for (typically C:), and [size] is the size of the space to allocate (e.g., 16 Gbytes). The default Shadow Copy allocation for any given volume is 15% of that volume's free space, but with this technique it can be ramped up or down to a precise amount if needed.
To change the System Restore schedule, open the Task Scheduler and drill down in the left hand pane to Task Scheduler Library -- Microsoft -- Windows -- SystemRestore (one word). In the top of the center pane you'll see the scheduled task for System Restore; double-click on it and select the Triggers tab. By default, System Restore is triggered on two occasions: 1) 30 minutes after the system is booted, and 2) at midnight every day. In both cases, by default, it'll run as soon as possible if a scheduled instance is missed. You can edit or disable either one of these triggers by double-clicking on them and changing the options.
I edited the System Restore schedule on my notebook, where I set System Restore set to run 12:00 AM on Monday morning, so it doesn't kick in during the rest of the week when I'm actually trying to get things done. Obviously, this means that fewer System Restore points are created -- but again, since there's nothing wholly irreplaceable on that machine, this isn't as big an issue. (My desktop, however, still has the default System Restore schedule.)
Note that if you make changes to System Restore settings (through the System Protection tab in System Properties -- Advanced), these scheduling options may be undone. Also, don't delete the SystemRestore task; you can just disable all the triggers if you don't want to run it for whatever reason. If you delete the task by mistake, you'll need to disable and re-enable System Restore from the Control Panel -- System -- System Protection menu. This will recreate the task with its default scheduling.
6 Use A Second Hard Drive To Parallelize Operations
A second internal hard drive isn't just a "place for your stuff," to quote George Carlin. It's also a way to speed things up. If you place your paging files or index files on those drives, access to them can be parallelized with other things so your system disk isn't bashed quite as hard.
With my systems that have a second drive, I place the biggest slice of the Windows paging file on that drive, and leave a small slice on the system drive for crash dumps. You can turn off the paging file on the system drive altogether as well, although this may limit the amount of information that can be generated when there's an error report.
It's also possible to place the Vista search index on a second hard drive, which also speeds things up. To move the index to another drive, click "Advanced" from the main Indexing Options menu, click "Select New," and you can point to another folder where you want a new copy of the index to be created. You'll need to reboot after doing this, and the index will have to be rebuilt from the ground up -- but after that you should see the index perform a bit better since it won't be overlapping with other system I/O.
I have been warned that if the second drive goes offline you'll get warnings about the index being invalid, but if that happens I suspect you'll have bigger things to worry about than a broken search index.
7 Tune Defrag, But Not To Excess
Defragging is one of those universally recommended system performance tweaks, but it should not be counted on excessively. It will not speed up a hard drive that is already slow, and it's not worth investing a great deal of time and effort in tweaking if the payoff is indiscernible.
Microsoft reworked how Defrag works in Vista -- it now runs by default as a scheduled task without user intervention. These changes inspired a lot of ire, mostly from people who insist on micromanaging defragmentation (whether or not such tweaking actually creates any measurable results), and not from regular users who hate having to remember to defrag.
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