HWiNFO 7.x + Rainmeter clarification

[Yodle]

Hi, I recently made a post on the Rainmeter forums that can be found here. Basically, I noticed that despite what their documentation says on this page, I am seeing continuous writes occurring while using HWiNFO Gadget, the proposed workaround to shared memory support which uses the Windows registry. I just wanted to make this post here to see if maybe I have something configured wrong in the settings or perhaps Windows itself to be causing this or if their documentation might be inaccurate. Either way, apologies if this is a known issue as I haven't been able to find any info specifically about the Gadget feature online (maybe I am the only user facing this issue -- someone on the Rainmeter forums says they aren't seeing the same behavior).

 

[Martin]

Windows Registry is a file on the disk (AFAIR located in: \Windows\System32\config\), but it should be fairly well cached in memory. So I think the issue here might be some limit in write buffers or registry caching.

 

[Yodle]

Thanks for the quick reply! Is that something I can fix on my end?

 

[Yodle]

FWIW I had Gadget recording all possible sensors to the registry... once I pruned it down to only the ones I need (around 70 currently) it seems like the difference in disk usage is a lot smaller between having Gadget toggled on or off. I don't really want any extra usage on my disk than necessary so I may end up reverting my Rainmeter skin back to using shared memory anyway.

 

[Martin]

I haven't found an answer to this yet, only this statement from Microsoft:

The registry has a 'lazy flush' mechanism that flushes registry modifications to disk at regular intervals of time. In addition to this regular flush operation, registry changes are also flushed to disk at system shutdown. Allowing the 'lazy flush' to flush registry changes is the most efficient way to manage registry writes to the registry store on disk.

 

[Yodle]

I used process explorer to examine the HWiNFO process and found it didn't consider whatever it was doing to be either reads or writes in terms of the I/O options, instead the only field that seemed to increase with the interval of sensor polling was "I/O Other" which doesn't seem too specific. I found this post https://superuser.com/questions/993...writes-and-i-o-read-bytes-or-write-bytes-mean which didn't seem to help much either, but it at least doesn't sound like it actually was writing to disk? The value kept increasing with and without Gadget being enabled so I don't think that mattered too much.

 

[Martin]

Are you maybe running some other application that might be doing periodic registry flushing?

 

[Yodle]

I'm not sure, I didn't have anything else open that I don't normally use on a daily basis. I could try closing everything except HWiNFO and see if that changes anything.