demagogue on 14/5/2017 at 04:12
I'm using Windows 10 and since last Friday I'm getting a problem that doesn't get hits when I search, which is odd since most problems always have other people reporting them.
Anyway, long story short, my HD has drained about 20GB and quickly deletes down to 0, I'll delete another 5GB or so, in another minute that's gone. Rince and repeat 4 or 5 times and about 20GB or so has been mysteriously sapped. I know from "Storage" in the Settings tab that it's going into "System Files". I haven't found where. Ran SpaceSniffer once fine, but any rerun for comparison is crashing. It's not usual suspects like paging files (it's sometimes contributing, but not that much) or windows/drivers updates (I'm not online and the relevant massive 6GB+ folders, DriverStore & WinSxS, aren't changing in size.) I got it to run again but I still can't see where the space is going, which is odd given how much it is. So annoying.
Next issue (I don't know if it's related) is I don't have admin permissions now so I can't touch system files or folders, which complicates the situation a lot more. When I try to change permissions on folders through the security tab, I'm not given permission to do that either. Edit: I have it for some folders but not others. I can't delete McAfee's quarantined files, but they probably complicate that on purpose. Edit2: of course it's becsuse it's being accessed by McAfee, which is impossible to turn off. I can't get into its settings because it locks it out until I renew, mfkers.
In the time it took to write this another 4 GB were lost.
So, Google isn't giving me any leads on this so far. Anybody have any ideas what's going on, or how to better find out what's going on? Needless to say it's making it virtually impossible to work on this computer because it quickly gets down to 0 bytes and everything crashes from there.
Edit3. In the time it took to write the edits 17GB have freed up on my HD. Fffffff... :mad:
I guess it's fine now? Nope, back down a GB again. I'm gonna take a break and get a coffee. Talk amongst yourselves if you like.
Pyrian on 14/5/2017 at 04:26
Well, you should at least be able to bring up the task manager, go to performance, bring up the resource monitor, and go to disk. Sort by Write and what's being written should pop out, I would think?
demagogue on 14/5/2017 at 05:01
Great idea. It's been so long since I've done this sort of stuff I'm losing my edge.
It's windows.edb, system, and our old friend svchost.exe. Searchindexer.exe is hogging the memory like a mofo. And something called edb.log keeps updating with Windows addresses and "software distribution".
So I guess it was Windows all along, but seriously, it's now back up to 20.5 GB from 65MB a few minutes ago. It's been averaging 20MB/sec write speed consistently this whole time. How can they let fluctuations at that kind of scale for that kind of duration pass?
Edit. Now it's already back down to 17GB. I never remember it being this wild.
demagogue on 14/5/2017 at 05:42
It seems to have stopped now. Final tally 23.4 GB reclaimed. So far so good.
Windows.edb is the search database. May be related to this issue:
(
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-edb-file)
My edb search database file is 32 GB! May have to do with using multiple external HDs.
It's a hidden file so doesn't come up on the inventory app. I think reclaiming 32 GB may be worth slower searches, or at least for new searches.
Or it could have just been doing a giant update and the edb was getting updated by that and it's a coincidence it was at the top of the queue. But as searchIndexer was doing all the writing, that's probably it.
Still pretty crazy either way.
PigLick on 14/5/2017 at 12:33
its not WUASERV is it, cos I had a very similar problem with a laptop and it turned out to be windows update server hogging all the cpu and memory
demagogue on 17/5/2017 at 09:35
Nah, although I've had the problem you're talking about before too, about a year ago IIRC.
This was a different thing & that link I posted explained it, well, and another page I found about a bug with it that I didn't post and can't find now. Windows (more specifically Searchindexer.exe) was writing to a search database file (Windows.edb), but there's a bug in there where it sometimes explodes the size of that database and writes literally 10s of gigabytes on to it in a go, which is what happened to me.
