high hard page default (attached .etl file)

[johnnygodto]

Hi everyone!

I have the RME babyface pro, and I still hear pops and clicks when playing back audio at 48 buffer size. My cpu is fairly powerful:

intel 4790k
nvidia gtx 970
16 gb hyperx fury ram
msi z97 motherboard
samsung 500 gb ssd
seagate 2tb sshd
nzxt s340 chassis
nzxt kraken x61 liquid cooler
corsair rm750i power supply


Here is latency mon results:



And here is the ETL file
Dropbox - CPU.etl


Many thanks for your help!!

 

[OldGrayGary]

Hi johnnygodto ... and welcome to the forums ...


First-class components in your system, that's for sure. Your USB audio device is professional-grade. If you are an audio professional, you might want to ask advice from a local sound/recording engineer [I actually have a step-brother-in-law who is one]. A full engineer would know how to use advanced tools like Microsoft's Media eXperience Analyzer (tech jargon shortens that to MXA) ... I haven't even made it through the first few tutorials (I just heard about it a few weeks ago).

But, since you're here, I suppose we can tell what we see on the Windows side of things. Nothing much to see in the trace as far as pagefaults, since the info for those wasn't captured. The DPC and ISR (latency & interrupts) look quite good. The pagefaults, of course, not so much.

Two ways to capture information about that: since you appear to have Latency Monitor already, you can use that, viewing the Processes tab, and sorting for highest pagefault usage. That very well might point to background activity that is interrupting the audio stream.

You can also try to catch things as they happen: you can try Microsoft/SysInternal's Process Monitor tool, so that if the process showing the highest page fault is a "Service Host", you can then use Process Monitor to have a look in real-time at what individual modules are running inside the offending "Service Host" (by the way, a "Service Host" gets the executable name svchost.exe ... that is how it will appear in the Process tab of either Latency Monitor or Process Explorer). If you can get the realtime PID (process identification number) for the offending Service Host with the high pagefaults, you can then look in Process Explorer and check inside the offending Service Host for which modules are the most active and likely to cause high pagefaults.

The "usual suspects" for such activity are system maintenance routines, such as Indexing chores, scheduled antivirus scans, online/local backup synchronization tasks, even defragging of hard drives - which is still performed for non-SSD drives. Even SSD drives have TRIM chores to execute (though in truth I have not read up much on the details of such yet).

Sort the Process tab in Latency Monitor by highest pagefault, and let's see who pops up.

We'd like the music to be popping in a good way, not a noisy way :)


P.S. ... here's the link to Microsoft/SysInternal's Process Explorer:
Process Explorer

 

[johnnygodto]

Two ways to capture information about that: since you appear to have Latency Monitor already, you can use that, viewing the Processes tab, and sorting for highest pagefault usage. That very well might point to background activity that is interrupting the audio stream.

You can also try to catch things as they happen: you can try Microsoft/SysInternal's Process Monitor tool, so that if the process showing the highest page fault is a "Service Host", you can then use Process Monitor to have a look in real-time at what individual modules are running inside the offending "Service Host" (by the way, a "Service Host" gets the executable name svchost.exe ... that is how it will appear in the Process tab of either Latency Monitor or Process Explorer). If you can get the realtime PID (process identification number) for the offending Service Host with the high pagefaults, you can then look in Process Explorer and check inside the offending Service Host for which modules are the most active and likely to cause high pagefaults.
r

You're so helpful. Thanks so much! I did what you told, but I've found that the highest culprit for pagefaults (according to latency mon) is explorer.exe! My pc was idle when it detected this, and explorer was not even open. Here is the screen:



Would you know what I can do to pinpoint explorer.exe's hard pagefault?

 

[johnnygodto]

Also, I did what you told me about svchost.exe. One of the PID's led me to this on the process explorer:



Interestingly, i see the word something-xperf.dll on the right-most column in a few of these processes. I haven't run xperf in quite a while, and I've restarted my pc since. Is it possible that xperf is running in the background?

 

[OldGrayGary]

Hi again

Strangely enough, the pagefaults don't look bad in your latest chart - this is likely due to the fact that your PC was idle at the time.

When you see explorer.exe in a list of processes, it doesn't mean that you have File Explorer open. The process explorer.exe has more job than one: one explorer.exe will always be running on a Windows computer, so long as the Windows "Desktop" is up and available. Both jobs: the job of displaying the desktop, as well as the job of providing the File Explorer functions, are provided by explorer.exe.

I wouldn't generally expect excessive pagefaults from explorer.exe. Try Latency Monitor again, and see if explorer comes out at the top of the list again - or not. To have the best idea of the possible audio interrupter, run Latency Monitor while using an activity that you know has given you trouble with audio artifacts.

Process Explorer will give you a nicely detailed picture of what resources are being used in realtime (since you can view it live, from moment to moment) ... than most other tools. I haven't used Process Monitor that much ... it might be able to provide cumulative numbers ... you could look in it's Help files & see if they can capture pagefault information.

I'm guessing that for the "monitors" (Latency Monitor, Process Monitor) - it's probably best to only run one of them at a time [partly because these monitoring programs can themselves be sources of high latency/pagefaults].

XPerf ... If you didn't start Performance Monitor, or schedule Performance Monitor, then it is likely the reference to "xperf" in tasks is referring to background maintenance routines scheduled automatically by Windows 10. I'll take a look and see what the opinions are as to adjusting the performance monitoring built-in by default into Windows 10. Might be something we could try to limit such activity.

If you'd like to have a look in on the processes running at startup on your computer, you can check in on the Startup tab of Task Manager - and see if there is any mention of "Performance Monitor" or "xperf.exe". Task Manager is available from the pop-up menu that results from right-clicking the Taskbar (usually the "bar" or "frame" that runs along the bottom of your screen).

If you want a truly comprehensive list of EVERYTHING running at startup on your computer, you can revisit the Microsoft/SysInternals/TechBench website, and let another of the utilities (called "Autoruns") show you what is running. You can test turning non-vital startups off using Autoruns, but you will want to be careful: try to be sure that what you disable from startup is truly non-vital to the proper running of your PC.
Autoruns for Windows
Note: you must run the program as an administrator to make changes (don't worry, though, Windows will prompt you & allow you to login as administrator if it detects you aren't already running with administrative privileges).

General, newsy, update:
Two recent events might impact your audio I/O...
1) A new Nvidia driver was released not very long ago (version 364.72, last time I checked) ... we've been advising having users install it using the Custom method, which lets you choose which components (should you like to pick and choose), but also provides the "perform a clean installation" option (which I recommend) ... this method seems to have a better chance of avoiding some audio issues associated with the Nvidia drivers.
2) Windows 10 Cumulative update: if you have Windows 10 Automatic Updates turn on, you should have received this update (which addresses a lot of issues, a few of them concerning audio problems). If you happen to have Windows 10 Updates arriving only when you wish, visit Windows Update manually, and install the latest Cumulative update.

That's the news for now...