Win7 Hibernate is too slow!

I find the Hibernate function on Win7 (and Vista) way too long compared to WinXP.
How come?

It really suck the way WIn7(Vista) would take as long as 40~80sec just to save-to-disk and turn off whereas on WinXP, it would take just as little as 10sec!

Right now, I am no longer using Hibernate because of this!

 

jsteng,

Many late XP-era machines shipped with 1GB-2GB. Many Windows 7 machines are starting around 2GB with 4GB representing middle of the road systems and 6GB+ for very powerful systems.

When you hibernate your machine, the system needs to write everything in RAM to disk. On XP machines, not all of the system RAM was used at any given time. While a typical XP machine might have 2GB of RAM, the system might only be using ~800MB, making for a rather small and quick to write hiberfil.sys file.

Windows 7 uses system RAM very differently: pre-caching lots of "often used bits", filling the previously unused portions of the system memory. This is one of the reasons Windows 7 machines are very responsive when loading often used programs - those bits are often already loaded into memory, just waiting to be run. Note that Windows 7 intelligently manages the caching process and will immediately relinquish background cached memory to foreground application requests for additional memory.

All of this is meant to be invisible to the end user. A side effect is that the hiberfil.sys file written is necessarily a much larger file. Thus a middle of the road system might need to write out a ~3.5GB hiberfil.sys on every hibernate. A 6GB system might be writing a ~5GB file, or larger. As you might imagine, a relatively slow 4500RPM drive notebook drive will really slow down that process. Upgrading to a 7200RPM drive could potentially halve your hibernate time and adding more RAM could actually lengthen your hibernate times.

--L.

 

Yeah, this is why hibernation isn't recommended for Windows 7. You're better off letting it take 30 seconds to start up normally. I thought hibernation was hidden by default anyway.

 

For me, Win7 hibernate is faster than it was under Vista. This is because apparently the hibernate file is both compressed and it does not include the entire contents of RAM. As I understand it, Win7 skips things that a in Superfetch that can be restored AFTER the machine has awakened from hibernation.

Gary

 

Resuming from hibernate takes less than 30 secs for me with Windows 7 64-bit and 4 GB RAM (only 3 GB saved to disk).

Where did you get this?

 

From multiple people telling me it's slow, and it not being enabled by default. lbohn seemed to explain it well.

 

Hibernate is not slow in Windows 7. It is enabled by default in notebooks and disabled only in Desktops.

 

I could never find it on my laptop. Is that because I did a fresh install? Sorry for hijacking the thread guys.

 

You might have deleted the "hiberfile.sys" using disk cleanup or a file cleaning utility. Under an admin account type "powercfg -h on" (no quotes) in the start menu search and hit enter to re-enable hibernate.

 

I think that's what happened too, because I just installed this W7 Ultimate not too long ago. Thank you! +Rep

 

Rajesh,

That's very similar to my experiences as well. I only have 3GB of RAM and ~2.2GB is saved to disk. That's about 80% of RAM capacity, which seems to be about the same as your experience.

Gary,

Interesting. My actual RAM usage (i.e. what is actively being used by programs and services) is ~1.7GB according to Task Manager yet my hiberfil.sys is never that small.

I do recall in the RC days of Vista and RTM period, the SuperFetch process constantly churned after hibernating because the ReadyBoost process would always repopulate the flash device. Microsoft's engineers wrote the code to expect the device was always missing upon resuming from hibernation even if it wasn't. SP1 saw that changed as many folks dedicated USB flash drives or flash cards to that purpose and weren't removing them. Now Vista won't necessarily repopulate a ReadyBoost device if it is still attached and has the expected ReadyBoost.sfcache file. It would appear they've reverted to the older style of SuperFetch in Windows 7, if I understand your post correctly.

--L.