How can I hunt down a bottleneck in Windows 10 when no hardware resources are overtaxed? I have a Windows 10 Pro workstation with pretty extreme hardware (24 physical cores, half terabyte of RAM), yet it often exhibits abysmal UI latency. Even at peak usage, hardware resources are rarely over 10% consumed. This includes CPU, RAM, I/O, Network, and GPU.
Despite all the horsepower, and with plentiful available resources, the OS becomes unusably slow—even unresponsive—for seconds at a time. Rebooting helps, but it makes no sense why it's necessary when every measurable hardware resource has oodles of headroom.
Examples: 24 hours after its last reboot:
- Hotkey Alt + Tab: Applications grid appears in 2 - 3 seconds.
- Hotkey Windows + R: Run dialog opens in 4 - 7 seconds.
- Click on Start button: Start menu appears after 5 seconds.
- Hotkey Windows + E: File explorer opens after 40 seconds; "Frequent folders" icons populate after another 12.
- Notepad++: Multi-second keystroke delay (buffer?) with auto-complete turned on (markedly better with this turned off).
- Hover over a Windows taskbar tile: 4 second delay before preview tile is displayed. …you get the picture.
I do run multiple instance of multiple browsers with multiple tabs; is there another resource these could be depleting? (Killing all the browsers often seems to only improve things by half, incidentally.) I would understand these making the browsers themselves slow, but across the OS?
