Resource Monitor shows erratic disk I/O

Danger781

I've been paying attention to Resource Monitor over the last two days in a Windows 10 VM (Running on ESXi). I'm noticing that when I look at Disk Activity in Resource Monitor it will climb as I'm reading or writing data to disk, but then randomly drop to 0 MB/s Disk I/O for a second, then spike back to whatever speed it was going, then drop back again to 0 MB/s Disk I/O for one or two seconds..



Is this something I should be worried about? Is Resource Monitor just buggy?

Danger781

Xterminator

i dont think resource monitor is usually glitchy.

id run a diagnostic on the disk 1st, in case its on the way out. You may have one built into bios, if not download one.

if the hdd comes up all clear, ran an antivirus scan, then assuming its all clear run a 3rd party one for second opinion, i recommend malware bytes as a good second opinion product.

If its still a mystery, install ccleaner, and look specifically at whats starting up/running as a service on your laptop and see if you can recognize everything, google is your friend here when you see services you don't recognise.
as an after though, id your ram is low, and normal memory usage is high, eg more than 60% of your ram is consumed when laptop is doing nothing, then it could also be caching to disk, ensure you have sufficient ram.

other steps to try - disable background disk indexing, check what scheduled scans run in the background for antivirus. clear all cache (use ccleaner), turn off scheduled defrags. see if any of them are the culprit.

ED E

Xterminator you've completely missed the fact that this is an ESXI guest. Throwing out general help doesn't actually help that much.


Danger I assume this is on a virtual disk and you aren't assigning a raw drive to it? If so then resource management by ESXI would give you spikes in the guest as it services different requests. You'd be better off looking at the hosts overall I/O vs what the VM is passing to a software pipe that it thinks is a piece of hardware.

Danger781

ED E wrote: »

Xterminator you've completely missed the fact that this is an ESXI guest. Throwing out general help doesn't actually help that much.


Danger I assume this is on a virtual disk and you aren't assigning a raw drive to it? If so then resource management by ESXI would give you spikes in the guest as it services different requests. You'd be better off looking at the hosts overall I/O vs what the VM is passing to a software pipe that it thinks is a piece of hardware.

Reckon you hit the nail on the head. It's a virtual disk assigned via vSphere. I'll play around Process Explorer instead to see if that offers an improvement.. If not I'll try monitoring via vSphere.



It doesn't appear to be causing any issues, and from what I can see the disk is functioning just fine.. It's more just for my own curiosity..

Xterminator

yep, i did completely miss that it was a Vm -