Hi,
I don't think it's something Resource Monitor can obtain easily (the add-on
uses Psutil, a process, disk, and CPU usage information library and I don't
believe this library has what's needed to show you what's commonly called
"disk activity" or throughput).
As an alternative, you can obtain disk usage info through Task Manager:
1. Open Task Manager (Control+Shift+Escape).
2. If not done so, select "more details".
3. Go to "performance" tab.
4. Under Performance, select the disk you wish to see its activity. You can
then use object navigation or screen review to view disk usage information
(screen review won't work on portable NVDA).
Cheers,
Joseph

-----Original Message-----
From: nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of Bob Cavanaugh
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2021 2:16 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: [nvda] resource monitor add-on or some other way?

Hi all,
I was on the phone with a technician this morning for about an hour because
for the past several months, my computer has been running quite slow. He
recommended I replace my hard drive, as he noted the hard drive response
time was extremely slow. When we finally hung up, I figured I'd get to my
usual daily computer activities, but found what shouldn't have been
surprising, my computer was painfully slow.
So, I restarted it, and it turned out it was installing more updates.
Now, performance is back to normal, but I want to continue to monitor my
hard drive's response time before I spend the money for a new drive. Is this
something the Resource monitor add-on can do, or do I need to do what he did
and open task manager? If the latter, how do I get NVDA to read this
information?
Bob

If you are having slowness secondary to hard disk drive performance, you need to proceed with great caution, and run a utility that lets you know the actual condition of your HDD.

Are any of the SMART parameters showing that something's off?  (I don't care what you might use to get them).

What does a utility like SeaTools for Windows (and I can't speak to accessibility, and it will work for non-Seagate branded drives) tell you about the health of your drive if you run the short test?

You could very well have a HDD that's on its way out.  If so, you do not want to wait for it to fail.
--

Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 20H2, Build 19042  

The depths of denial one can be pushed to by outside forces of disapproval can make you not even recognize yourself to yourself.

       ~ Brian Vogel

 

Hi Nolan

Thanks for sharing your Firefox related performance problems

I use it frequently and have observed similar problems in recent weeks
I usually use nightly and I often have many windows and many tabs in each
window open
I also use a script locker
My computer may be a little older than yours but very similar hardware
configuration
Sometimes we starting Firefox helps and sometimes we starting nvda helps
Sometimes I will come back to the machine in the morning after not using it
overnight but leaving things up just locking my screen and it will be
almost unusable

Thanks for the tip on using brave maybe I'll give that a try at some point

Just wanted to chime in and let you know I've had similar observations with
things pointing in similar directions to your conclusions

using the task manager I haven't been able to pinpoint anything other than
Firefox using lots of resources

I haven't done any deep dive into logs

Russ

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 9:14 AM Nolan Darilek <nolan@thewordnerd.info> wrote:

I'm a bit hesitant to wade into this, but I too am a bit suspicious by
the
jump directly to HD issues.

Long shot, but you're not running Firefox or Thunderbird by chance, are
you?

I've been having some odd, regular slowdowns recently. My PC is fairly
high-power--I7, 8 cores, 32 GB of RAM, a few years old but not
under-powered. Windows installation is only a few months old, but
previously it ran Linux and barely broke a sweat. Under Windows, I got
about a day or two of use before I often had to hard powercycle the
machine. Task Manager didn't give me much that was reliable. Antimalware
Service was often high on the performance list, but not reliably. I
couldn't trace it to a specific action or change--my CPU fan would
eventually go crazy, and my entire system would slowly go unresponsive.

Eventually I tracked it to Firefox. Killing Firefox always replaced the
need for a reboot. Tried debugging Firefox further--disabling some
extensions, using Nightly, etc. Nothing reliably fixed it. I'm also
using a few layers of ad blocking, and while the blocking itself may
have slowed things down a bit, I imagine the code that was blocked and
didn't run probably cancelled out the extra effort the blockers made
filtering it out. So it likely wasn't any page in particular, and none
reliably caused this behavior either.

Now I'm running Brave, and the problems are mostly gone. I do, however,
experience slowdowns when working in Thunderbird, particularly when
opening a message. Yes, I've seen the Thunderbird speedup tips recently,
but I don't feel like those helped, particularly since things worked
fine under Linux.

Starting to wonder if there's some Gecko NVDA regression, or maybe a
Gecko regression with the underlying a11y APIs. Haven't tried diagnosing
it further, but as a developer that's kind of what this feels like.
Wondering if you might be hitting this too. Are you running FF, and if
so, does killing it get your performance back? I guess this could be
non-a11y-related, or maybe an issue with crappy drivers, but if this
regression were more mainstream then I can't imagine it wouldn't be high
priority and fixed. That's why I suspect something in the a11y stack.

If response time is back to normal, I am suspicious about the assertion that

the hard drive is the problem. We'll have to see if the updates and the
good response time are just a coincidence or not. But I would think that if

a computer is operating slowly, that might result in the hard drive doing
things slowly as well because a lot of things are slow and the hard drive
may be slowing down to accommodate that.

During the slow period, for example, if you were working on something like a

Word document, and you moved from line to line, was the computer slow in
reading the line you move to? That's one example of where actions are being

taken that have nothing to do with the hard drive. A good deal is done in
RAM and the hard drive isn't used. Loading a program is done from the hard

drive, but a program actually working isn't necessarily involving the hard
drive.

I don't know anything about how the tech tested the machine but I'm
suspicious of techs and often don't take with high confidence what they say,

especially if I know nothing about the quality of the tech.

Also, if general slowness of the hard drive were the problem, I would think

the machine might take a much longer time to reboot than usual. Was that
the case?

Gene
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Cavanaugh
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2021 4:15 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: [nvda] resource monitor add-on or some other way?

Hi all,
I was on the phone with a technician this morning for about an hour
because for the past several months, my computer has been running
quite slow. He recommended I replace my hard drive, as he noted the
hard drive response time was extremely slow. When we finally hung up,
I figured I'd get to my usual daily computer activities, but found
what shouldn't have been surprising, my computer was painfully slow.
So, I restarted it, and it turned out it was installing more updates.
Now, performance is back to normal, but I want to continue to monitor
my hard drive's response time before I spend the money for a new
drive. Is this something the Resource monitor add-on can do, or do I
need to do what he did and open task manager? If the latter, how do I
get NVDA to read this information?
Bob

I'm a bit hesitant to wade into this, but I too am a bit suspicious by the
jump directly to HD issues.

Long shot, but you're not running Firefox or Thunderbird by chance, are
you?

I've been having some odd, regular slowdowns recently. My PC is fairly
high-power--I7, 8 cores, 32 GB of RAM, a few years old but not
under-powered. Windows installation is only a few months old, but
previously it ran Linux and barely broke a sweat. Under Windows, I got
about a day or two of use before I often had to hard powercycle the
machine. Task Manager didn't give me much that was reliable. Antimalware
Service was often high on the performance list, but not reliably. I
couldn't trace it to a specific action or change--my CPU fan would
eventually go crazy, and my entire system would slowly go unresponsive.

Eventually I tracked it to Firefox. Killing Firefox always replaced the
need for a reboot. Tried debugging Firefox further--disabling some
extensions, using Nightly, etc. Nothing reliably fixed it. I'm also
using a few layers of ad blocking, and while the blocking itself may
have slowed things down a bit, I imagine the code that was blocked and
didn't run probably cancelled out the extra effort the blockers made
filtering it out. So it likely wasn't any page in particular, and none
reliably caused this behavior either.

Now I'm running Brave, and the problems are mostly gone. I do, however,
experience slowdowns when working in Thunderbird, particularly when
opening a message. Yes, I've seen the Thunderbird speedup tips recently,
but I don't feel like those helped, particularly since things worked
fine under Linux.

Starting to wonder if there's some Gecko NVDA regression, or maybe a
Gecko regression with the underlying a11y APIs. Haven't tried diagnosing
it further, but as a developer that's kind of what this feels like.
Wondering if you might be hitting this too. Are you running FF, and if
so, does killing it get your performance back? I guess this could be
non-a11y-related, or maybe an issue with crappy drivers, but if this
regression were more mainstream then I can't imagine it wouldn't be high
priority and fixed. That's why I suspect something in the a11y stack.