Been doing a fair bit of research into this but can't find a reasonable solution. Basically Vista x64 is filling up my 12GB of ram with unimportant files that it wants to cache, and it causes huge hard-drive thrashing. Here it was a few minutes after boot, just cached-flushed-cached about 6.8GB of Dragon Age files!!

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/sf_da.jpg

If I disable the Superfetch service it stops doing it obviously, but I'd prefer it to fetch important stuff (like startup system files) as it's meant to be beneficial for stuff like that. Many guides on the internet offered an alternative of setting the EnableSuperfetch registry key to "1" to get it to fetch only boot files. I've tried this (and rebooted) and it still crawls into my Steam directory to cache half of my games.

Anyone got an idea? Am I setting the value incorrectly? Need to change the EnablePrefetcher key too?

Yeah I had this issue in vista and everyone told me I was an idiot noob who didn't know s*** and superfetch was great. Superfetch can go die in a fire, thrashing my hard drive while I'm in the middle of a game #%*$@%*()@

I'd disable it for playing games then enable it again once I was done and once it'd done whatever it was vista did with superfetch it settled down. Whenever I put a new file on the hard drive it seemed to take an interest in that & go take a look at it, once again thrashing my hard drive but as before it would go back to normal once windows had lost interest in the file for whatever reason.

How long as windows been installed for? I'd say it probably took a week to really settle down on my PC but I don't leave it on all the time and I had a LOT of large files (3-20gig) for windows to look at.

I have no idea why superfetch would take an interest in new files, I'd have thought that would be the realm of the search indexer but nope, it was superfetch looking at all my files. Maybe it was because I accessed them frequently or something but I don't know why it would look at a file I'd only just put there.

I suppose there's not really any helpful info in this post other than it seemed to fix itself after being installed for a while.

last edited by whoop at 04:36:44 26/Dec/09

I just turned it off and left it at that. Although now that I have upgraded to Windows 7 I might look at it again.

Pretty sure I just turned it off in Vista as it was obnoxious and there didn't seem to be a setting for it to shut up until idle or to just chill out.

I think the 7 version seems to be a lot less so - I haven't been motivated to go looking for it yet.

How long has windows been installed for?

About 3 months now. Superfetch is meant to load stuff into ram based on predicted usage. Sounds great in theory. But it predicts I play Dragon Age and Batman at night and keeps loading one game, flushing, loading the other game, flushing and repeat around night-time. Yet I'm just sitting here on many nights without any intention of playing games and it's shuffling games in and out of ram continually (since obviously both games probably can't fit into 12GB).

Might renamed my Steam folder every once in a while to disrupt it, or just disable fetch completely. Piece of crap feature.

i think this is one of the first things you disable when you load vista

its a bucket of s***

First time I've heard of superfetch. Is there no way to modify when and what it caches? If it's all automated then it's a bit useless.

Ok I stand corrected, it looks like this time around I permanently disabled superfetch. I was on a different PC when I posted last night but could have sworn I left it enabled for the most part. Oh well I guess that answers that.

Is there no way to modify when and what it caches? If it's all automated then it's a bit useless.

As I mentioned apparently by editing the registry you can select whether you want it disabled, to have it cache only boot files, to only cache applications, or to cache everything. Unfortunately the registry change doesn't have any effect for me, it just always caches everything. The only control I have is to go into Control Panel and disable the Superfetch service. Hard-drive instantly goes deathly silent as it should be.

Many people have been asking around if you can exclude certain directories, etc but it seems you really don't have much control over the details. It either runs or it doesn't ... might just keep it turned off permanently.

last edited by parabol at 02:12:42 27/Dec/09

Maybe there is more services we can set to MANUAL or only have on limited accounts in Windows 7 or Vista

http://www.blackviper.com/Windows_7/servicecfg.htm ?

Although BlackViper has stated here it should be left on auto we could quite possibly set it to manual or leave it disabled I reckon.

Maybe the SuperFetch feature is like the whole page file in Windows XP maybe we could limit how it behaves and or how much size is takes up?

I remember someone at M$ was talking about how you could use USB devices for as "temporary RAM" anyone know more about this? Can anyone find the quote on this? It was about 2008 when they started talking about how you could use the USB drives as 'quick RAM' for storage of temporary RAM. But I've lost the article now.

Found it:
http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/29/windows-vista-superfetch-readyboost.aspx

So in theory ReadyBoost works ??with?? SuperFetch to precache (Much like the Windows XP Indexing Service -- I think) to make programs run fast so if you modify the ReadyBoost feature it should change your SuperFetch. Maybe we should change the ReadyBoost to run off of a different source.

Questions to think about:

What if we just used ReadyBoost and not Superfetch? What if we turned 'Superfetch' off?
http://www.messagingblogs.com/2009/06/22/speed-up-your-windows-7-using-readyboost-feature.html

This one is from some Q&A guy at M$ and how they to properly use ReadyBoost:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/04/14/576548.aspx

I can also see where the Solid State Hard Drives are going to come into play in the near future with this as well. Cause solid state hard drives have a small amount of FlashRAM in the hard drive that stores programs temporarily away from the main mechanical section. This is what ReadyBoost is going to be used for. A temporary work around for this would be to get some small 16 gig USB drives and tell Windows to use the Pagefile. Sure the load time might be a slight longer but in theory it works cause you wouldn't be storing a lot on the main hard drive.

This link also might interest you about NTFS and ReadyBoost:
http://www.msblog.org/2006/06/01/vista-readyboost-or-snailboost/

I can also see where the Solid State Hard Drives are going to come into play in the near future with this as well

Doubt it, it's just a fast-access cache. Slower than RAM, but faster than pulling the same data from a mechanical hard-drive. Good if you have 1GB of memory or less, has very little effect if you have more RAM. You'll notice most of the articles about ReadyBoost talk about laptops with low RAM.

If you have your files on SSDs it would be just as quick to pull data from the solid-state volume itself as it would be to pull it from a Readyboost solid-state cache since they are the same technology, ignoring cache-algorithm/filesystem overheads. Overall it's better and cheaper to just get more RAM to stop Windows from running out of memory and swapping so much stuff to disk. You can buy 8GB of fast DDR3 for $250 or so these days, dirt cheap.