Fixed audio stutter: Turned off Executive Paging

2014-06-09 15:51:39

I've been plagued with stuttering output for what seems like forever, and finally stumbled upon a fix yesterday. This fix applies to both my desktop and laptop, both running Windows 7 Pro, so I thought I would post it here in case it might help someone else.

The fix is to turn off Executive Paging on a 64-bit Windows system with lots of RAM. Instructions on how to change the registry setting can be found here and other places.

Details:
Desktop: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, I7 processor, 16GB RAM, SSD, Foobar2000 V1.3.2.
Laptop: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, I7 processor, 8GB RAM, SSD, Foobar2000 V1.3.2.
Both are incredibly fast systems, but according to my research should not be doing this even if they were old 1-lungers running XP.
I run Foobar on either of these machines, Bluetooth output to a simulated headphone receiver hooked to my home audio system, and play my music throughout the house. Wonderful solution, but I was experiencing annoying stuttering most of the time.

So I ran DPC Latency Checker per instructions on this forum, and found red bars everywhere, coincident with the stutters. I started turning off drivers but had little success there, except with some of the LAN/bridge setup, and upgraded those drivers. But even with that it still stuttered, just not as often.

I then found this item, which instructed me to install the Windows Performance Toolkit, which as part of the setup told me that I had to turn off Executive Paging (what's that???), and it did that for me. I never got any further, because after the required reboot, the problem, according to DPC Latency Checker and my ears, was no longer there. It's been running without stutter or red bars for a day now, and the problem hasn't returned--latency is now a max of about 400 microseconds, averaging about 130. BTW, Windows Performance Toolkit is incredibly robust, but complex, and the above referenced link isn't up to date enough to follow.

So what's Executive Paging? Turns out that Windows by default, including the 64-bit versions with large RAM configurations, actually allow paging part of the kernel, including drivers. So in this case the stutter was most likely caused by driver paging. It's possible that driver paging was exposing a deeper problem that I haven't hit on yet, but both systems are running standard Win7 with the latest service, and I haven't messed with either one. I did build the desktop from scratch and installed Win7 on the laptop over the OS it came with, the abominable Win8, after about a week of trying to deal with it.

There is very little information available about Executive Paging. Why Microsoft chooses to have it turned on on 64-bit systems with lots of RAM is hard to fathom. When I'm running my desktop hard with several large applications (I do serious computing), I typically still have 6-8GB free out of 16GB total; much more available. Paging a few meg of kernel to free up some memory just doesn't make sense. As it is, some of the discussion groups dealing with SSDs recommend turning it off because it keeps the paging system too busy and wears out the SSDs with too much activity. And as an old IT professional (51 years now), I can say with assurance that the best paging system is the one that doesn't page at all!

I hope this helps someone. If anyone knows of an underlying problem that may have caused this, please post.

Fixed audio stutter: Turned off Executive Paging

Reply #1 – 2014-06-09 19:46:15

I've never seen this problem.

What surprises me is that Windows would page out a driver that obviously is needed every now and then even on a machine with 16 GiBs of RAM?!