The Secret Life of SuperFetch

One of the more mysterious new features of Windows Vista is its SuperFetch memory management subsystem. Billed as a "smart" pre-caching mechanism, SuperFetch is supposed to improve system responsiveness by monitoring application usage patterns and then pre-loading application code in anticipation of the next task. SuperFetch uses the time of day and other behavioral markers to determine what to load when, using the Windows memory manager's Standby List as its entry point (the ever illuminating Mark Russinovich goes into more detail in his recent TechNet Article).

Of course, it all sounds good on paper. But how do you quantify the impact of something that's designed to work in the background and to be essentially undetectable (beyond some vague sense that the OS is more responsive)? For starters, it helps to know where to find it. SuperFetch runs as a Windows Service under the SVCHOST alias. The actual filename is sysmain.dll, so a quick scan of Task Manager to correlate the Process ID with the instance of SVCHOST in question gets you in touch with SuperFetch.

Next, you need a way to monitor both SuperFetch's behavior and its impact on system responsiveness. The first part is easy - any Vista-compatible metrics agent will do the trick, though we prefer the one we provide through the xpnet: DMS Clarity Tracker. Measuring the second part - how SuperFetch impacts the system - is a bit trickier.

Here we used another xpnet tool, DMS Clarity Studio, to generate a scripted productivity workload spanning Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Internet Explorer. By comparing before/after results with SuperFetch enabled/disabled (and rebooting after each test run) we were able to determine that Microsoft's new VMM magic is indeed having a positive impact on application responsiveness. With the service enabled, Startup times - as measured by the OfficeBench test script - were cut in half, this after multiple "training" runs to allow SuperFetch to map the usage pattern (i.e. "We run Office after booting").

We'll be conducting additional research and testing around SuperFetch and other new Vista technologies (Integrated Search, ReadyBoost) in future blog entries for the exo.performance.network. Stay tuned!