Shining a Light on SuperFetch

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Sovereign

2[H]4U
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I know that you can't control what it does, that it is best left alone (TM Average Joe) etc. etc. etc.

What I want to know, though, is if there's any way to tell (for the curious) what it's caching. How well does Windows know my computing habits? I mean my Task Manager says 4520MB cached, 4MB free. Great. SuperFetch is working. What's it working on though?
 
It's caching the browser you're using to make such posts. It's caching the software you run the most. And yes, I know that rhymes, sorta. :D

The issue with SuperFetch from a performance standpoint is that people always wanna know what the hell is going on and... I don't think it's possible to actively monitor such activity with SuperFetch. If it is, I'd have expected Mark Russinovich or someone on the Systernals team (now part of the Redmond behemoth) to have put out some little tool like Process Monitor (FetchMon, perhaps?) that will give you some clues to work with.

Resource Monitor doesn't do nearly enough, as much as I don't like admitting it. Great tool, a step in the right direction for us tweakhounds and people that want to know every little thing, but still missing a lot of possibles.

If opening and closing apps or using 'em doesn't give you some general idea of how well your system is performing, well... uhmmm... not sure what you'd be looking for. :)
 
I would like to see greater customisation. Like forcing what gets cached. And especially making sure that it doesn't try to cache some things that are hundreds of MB large yet isn't used that often. I would prefer it to cache a lot of small programmes and not a few big ones. Regardless of usage pattern.
 
I can say that Windows 7 has improved on SuperFetch dramatically, I just can't say why. :) But when the beta becomes public, a lot more info will get released about the hows and whys...
 
Joe Average said:
I can say that Windows 7 has improved on SuperFetch dramatically, I just can't say why. :) But when the beta becomes public, a lot more info will get released about the hows and whys...
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Are the improvements going to be in SP2? Can't see myself switching to W7 yet since I got my Server 2008 free.
 
When i was trying out Vista, whenever i turn on my PC to play a game, there's massive harddrive activity. I can feel it especially when playing Crysis which also streams continiously from the harddrive. So i end up leaving it alone for several minutes until Vista finishes starting up and frees the harddrive before i run anything. I'm assuming that was superfetch at work?
 
Sly said:
When i was trying out Vista, whenever i turn on my PC to play a game, there's massive harddrive activity. I can feel it especially when playing Crysis which also streams continiously from the harddrive. So i end up leaving it alone for several minutes until Vista finishes starting up and frees the harddrive before i run anything. I'm assuming that was superfetch at work?
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Yep. It's also one of the primary reasons I always put the PC to sleep rather than power-off. Vista is designed for this.
 
Sovereign said:
I know that you can't control what it does, that it is best left alone (TM Average Joe) etc. etc. etc.
Click to expand...
That's not entirly true. You can edit the registry to let it optimize start-up programs only, OS start up time, or both. The default is both.
What I want to know, though, is if there's any way to tell (for the curious) what it's caching. How well does Windows know my computing habits? I mean my Task Manager says 4520MB cached, 4MB free. Great. SuperFetch is working. What's it working on though?
Click to expand...
No, it's encrypted.

As for Windows 7 SuperFetch improvements, what I noticed was there is less disk activity. I think that Windows 7 is just not as aggressive with SuperFetch as Vista is, so there can be better performance on slower hardware. I didn't notice a faster boot time with 7, but I did notice that the cpu utilization and SuperFetch was not as aggressive.

I did benchmark Windows 7 vs Vista in games, and they were identical (1FPS margin) FPS across 3 games.

If you don't like Vista because of performance reasons, 7 may have some slight improvements like boot time and it does take it easier on hardware. Gaming is not going to be much better. But the GUI/Layout is identical so if you don't like Vista because of how it looks, you won't like 7 either.
 
bigdogchris said:
As for Windows 7 SuperFetch improvements, what I noticed was there is less disk activity. I think that Windows 7 is just not as aggressive with SuperFetch as Vista is, so there can be better performance on slower hardware. I didn't notice a faster boot time with 7, but I did notice that the cpu utilization and SuperFetch was not as aggressive.

I did benchmark Windows 7 vs Vista in games, and they were identical (1FPS margin) FPS across 3 games.

If you don't like Vista because of performance reasons, 7 may have some slight improvements like boot time and it does take it easier on hardware. Gaming is not going to be much better. But the GUI/Layout is identical so if you don't like Vista because of how it looks, you won't like 7 either.
Click to expand...

But I mean it is only in pre-beta, so maybe this'll change (probably not by much though). It's awesome to hear Windows 7 superfetch is making big improvements. :D
 
Hypernova said:
I would like to see greater customisation. Like forcing what gets cached. And especially making sure that it doesn't try to cache some things that are hundreds of MB large yet isn't used that often. I would prefer it to cache a lot of small programmes and not a few big ones. Regardless of usage pattern.
Click to expand...

I read a post by one of the devs which stated that they specifically designed Superfetch so that it's impossible to customize, because they feared that if it was possible to modify the caching settings, various applications would abuse the ability. I doubt we'll ever see that changed.
 
Well I know that Superfetch is caching stuff like Firefox and Live Mail because when I start them there's no HD activity and they start almost instantly. Beyond that, it's a mystery.. :confused: However pretty much every app I use frequently seems to launch virtually instantly in Vista so it must be doing some good.

I have never found the Superfetch caching to conflict with games. Vista is supposed to use low-priority IO for stuff like Defrag and Superfetch.
 
SuperFetch tracks what programs you use on specific days and times, and adjust what it caches based on that. So there is no need to configure it.

But I will say that Vista, even after a week of use without reboot, runs perfect. This OS is designed to be up weeks if not months at a time without reboots. XP started getting clunky after a week.
 
Violator said:
Yep. It's also one of the primary reasons I always put the PC to sleep rather than power-off. Vista is designed for this.
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I had never really thought about this until I saw your post. Previous versions of sleep just seemed to be a nightmare, Vista's works quite well!
 
While I never had a problem with XP's standby using my laptop, I've heard nightmares about when XP's standby/hibernate did not work and left you with a dead battery and overheated computer. Vista's Sleep mode does not suffer from these problems.
 
Joe Average said:
I can say that Windows 7 has improved on SuperFetch dramatically, I just can't say why. :) But when the beta becomes public, a lot more info will get released about the hows and whys...
Click to expand...

Ahem... The beta is public now, nudge, nudge. :p Yes, I may just install Windows 7 and find out for myself. If nothing else I can test it out on my current and old hardware and report any issues.

I'd love to see a superfetch 'profile' in the future, simply from the standpoint of being able to immediately take a game out of the superfetch 'queue' when I'm done playing with it.

As an aside, it is flat out amazing how many people are recommending that people disable superfetch. I can see where it might benefit a very few people but from a cursory look at Google results it looks like disabling superfetch is being used as a troubleshooting method for speeding up Vista. :confused:
 
Sovereign said:
I know that you can't control what it does, that it is best left alone (TM Average Joe) etc. etc. etc.

What I want to know, though, is if there's any way to tell (for the curious) what it's caching. How well does Windows know my computing habits? I mean my Task Manager says 4520MB cached, 4MB free. Great. SuperFetch is working. What's it working on though?
Click to expand...
The files are encrypted as far as I know. Plus, you can control what it does. You can modify it to cache system boot files, program files, or both. The default is both. Google it if you want to know how to do it.
 
eggrock said:
As an aside, it is flat out amazing how many people are recommending that people disable superfetch. I can see where it might benefit a very few people but from a cursory look at Google results it looks like disabling superfetch is being used as a troubleshooting method for speeding up Vista. :confused:
Click to expand...

Some people live in the stone age where when we used to say "___ is hogging all of your ram".

We just have to reeducate everyone.
 
Azhar said:
Some people live in the stone age where when we used to say "___ is hogging all of your ram".

We just have to reeducate everyone.
Click to expand...

That's the problem; some people are simply not willing to learn or have grudges that they don't want to give up. The solution? Drag them into progression kicking and screaming I guess.

What's the saying? You can't fix stupid? :p
 
Jon55 said:
That's the problem; some people are simply not willing to learn or have grudges that they don't want to give up. The solution? Drag them into progression kicking and screaming I guess.

What's the saying? You can't fix stupid? :p
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that and "can't teach an old dog new tricks" ;)
 
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