What EXACTLY is "Highest Active Time" and what does it mean for me?

[pnartg]

Very often when I start a big program (e.g., Adobe Premiere Pro, Microsoft Office, etc), or return to my PC after a lunch break or other absence and resume work my PC becomes V-E-R-Y sluggish and unresponsive and I hear the disk chattering like crazy. When I look in my resource monitor at Disk Activity I see the blue Highest Active Time line pegged to the top. Eventually the blue line goes back down and then I can get some work done. But this is a real productivity bottleneck.

Many times the Disk I/O - green area - is not very high when this is happening.

Windows 7 says my disk is only 9% fragmented.

My C: drive is a Seagate ST3500413AS, about half full.

What EXACTLY does the blue line represent?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Snipergod87]

Highest active time at 100% means the disk is using 100% of its resources to try and do whatever it is being told to.
The Green area is the throughput, and major part to look for is the disk queue, for a mechanical HDD a queue depth over 5 its going to be rather slow in terms of responsiveness

 

[LinuxDevice]

Don't suspend to disk.

 

[pnartg]

Don't suspend to disk.

What does that mean? (On a Windows 7 PC). This isn't a laptop that does a "sleep" or "hibernate"; it's a desktop workstation.

 

[pnartg]

Highest active time at 100% means the disk is using 100% of its resources to try and do whatever it is being told to.
The Green area is the throughput, and major part to look for is the disk queue, for a mechanical HDD a queue depth over 5 its going to be rather slow in terms of responsiveness

How do I read the Queue Length scale? On right the side of the graph it has a scale that says 0 on the bottom and 0.01 on the top. What does that mean? I found an image on the web that looks like mine: https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/dataCenter-Virtualization/fig9-diskperf.png
... but I've also seen other screenshots of the Queue Length scale where they have an actual integer on that scale, e.g.,
https://www.enhansoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Why-Are-My-Virtual-Machines-Slow-Resource-Monitor.jpg
... I thought maybe the lines represented the queue length but the 5 at the top of the scale confuses that because there are a lot more than 5 lines.

 

[LinuxDevice]

Don't suspend to disk.

What does that mean? (On a Windows 7 PC). This isn't a laptop that does a "sleep" or "hibernate"; it's a desktop workstation.

It doesn't matter if it is a laptop or PC. In the control panel you will find settings for power savings or screensavers, so on. I'm not where I can look at the moment for an exact answer, but typically there will be something you can check on for whether shutdown suspends to ram or whether it actually shuts down.

If you were coming back after a reboot there are all kinds of things which would use the hard drive...but after going away and coming back such activity implies it chose to suspend and rewake from disk.

Also, similar settings for what to do when there is inactivity.