help troubleshoot a performance bug

[Parmenides]

I have a problem on my computer where my game (Oblivion) preformance significantly drops at random times. Normally, things run fine, then suddenly I hit a brick wall. I can sometimes happen within minutes of gameplay and sometimes within hours. Exiting the game and going back in won't fix it. Only rebooting the computer fixes the problem.

When this bug kicks in, my GPU fan and CPU fan slow down to a relaxing speed as fps drop. There is a second audible indicator of the bug: I have a noisy little toroidal transformer. Thanks to pstang for pointing it out.

These puppies squeak more when under load, mine normally gives minor occasional squeaks. When this bug kicks in, however, one of these transformers go crazy. When I exit the game, every action is still a lot more squeaky. Even moving the mouse causes squeaking, which does not happen under normal conditions. Now, I'm not as concerned with the squeaking. As soon as I figure out my other problems, nail polish remover should do the job. What I am concerned about is that this squeaking is a symptom of something going wrong. Do you have any ideas what is going bad?


A lot of people are on the Elderscrolls forums with this same sudden-drop-of-performance-after-time problem. Most people guess that it's a memory leak problem. I have 2 gigs of memory, so I'm not sure about that.

Any trouble shoot ideas? The time before this bug kicks in is getting significantly more and more shorter. Any application, not just games, runs a lot slower after this "thing" kicks in. I am constantly forced to reboot, which is my only solution to the problem.

 

[Frank4d]

I can't help with the slow down issue, but a few drops of epoxy should fix the transformer problem.

 

[Chernobyl1]

I found that my bittorrent client used to thrash the hard drive causing my gaming to stutter a lot on a well used XP install. It used to happen quite a bit until I reinstalled windows. Using exactly the same config it is fine now.
I doubt its your problem but just in case.

To start troubleshooting your problem it would be good to know the following:

1) the peak commit charge after the problem happens with Oblivion (check in task manager/performance)
2) other programs you have installed that are running
3) what services are active
4) what processes are running, how much memory and cpu they take (if more than say 30MB and/or 5% cpu)
5) the overall free memory when the machine is idle and the cpu use when idle.
monitor it over a good 10 mins to see if any cpu spikes occur.

Useful things you can do...
Can you run a CPU monitoring program that can log the CPU use of all the processes to a file?
This may not be practical while gaming but it would be nice to know if your gaming is causing another process to bottleneck the CPU or if a process takes a lot of memory all of a sudden.

change the swap file to a different hard disk and defragment the drive it was sat on. Put the swapfile back after.
(if you have a decent defragmenting program just defrag the drive with the swapfile on).

If the swapfile is heavily fragmented, many more reads/writes can be needed to perform the simplest of tasks. This can hold the PC up while gaming if a running app/util etc requires data that was swapped out to disk. (note: having more memory doesnt stop some things being swapped out, that will happen unless you change the way windows handles the swapfile and some cannot be stopped.)
If your swapfile is on the same drive as torrents etc download to, move it to another drive as torrents fragment drives heavily.

The swapfile can become fragmented in 2 ways.
It can be fragmented on the disk drive
It can fragment its own internal memory map.
A combination of the 2 will result in high CPU use on some accesses to the swapfile.
Defragmenting the drive + deleting and recreating the swap file will remedy this.

It may be quicker to try a new installation of Windows on another drive so you can tell if it is down to the Windows installation.
I re-install about every 6 months. With my PC usage thats how long it takes to start getting its knickers in a twist. You can clean your PC up but you may never know some of the things that have crept in.
A re-install is an effective way to make sure your system is clean of the malware which 'could' be responsible for your problem.

If you come across any other clues about what your system is up to, it would be helpful.