Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Your question

How Can the Registry Slow Down a Computer?

Tags:
  • Computers
  • Registry
  • Windows 7
Last response: in Windows 7
Share
October 14, 2014 10:16:41 AM

It makes no sense to me because the registry is permanately-stored data, so I don't see how a large overfilled registry could possibly slow down a computer. A lot of files does not slow down a computer so why a large registry?

More about : registry slow computer

a b $ Windows 7
October 14, 2014 10:21:29 AM

Beacause the registry is essintally a database of many entries.

Thus it takes less time to search through 1000 entries then 50000.
m
0
l
October 14, 2014 10:24:23 AM

Why would Microsoft make it like that? They should set it up as a file system in which the file can be simply accessed directly from the hard drive quickly without searching, such as opening a txt file.
m
0
l
Related resources
a c 633 $ Windows 7
October 14, 2014 10:27:10 AM

The Registry is being read and written to hundreds of times a second.

Grab ProcMon and see for yourself:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb89664...

As for "as opening a txt file"...it used to be like that. Each application had its own .ini file.
The Reg was their answer to consolidate things.
m
0
l
a b $ Windows 7
October 14, 2014 10:30:03 AM

It would take significantly longer to search through thousands of text files and open them, vs using a database.

You could organize them into folders but it would not be nearly as simple as trees in a database.

Those 50000 text files would take up a significant more amount of space and would have to load all of them into system memory or have even slower performance.
m
0
l
October 14, 2014 11:38:25 AM

Over time you may install / uninstall / update programs, add new hardware etc. All these things will cause changes to the registry. Some things get left behind which adds to the computers workload to sort through / load and some can cause instability.

If you had to sort through lots of conflicting information as opposed to just the info you needed you would slow down as well.
m
0
l
October 14, 2014 1:05:06 PM

@boosted1g: The thing is, using something such as a txt file renamed to perhaps .set for settings, no searching would be needed because programs themselves would store data on which file to open. Take MS Word for example, when I click msword.exe to run the file, it has to search the registry for entries that it specifies, particularly settings. Rather than searching for entires, would it not be easier for msword.exe to store data on the directory of settings and then access the .set file from that directory without even needing to search for the settings itself through a whole bunch of files?

Take a website for example (for you coders). If you use .txt files in the root directory of your public_html folder that store data on each user, such as let's say the user's bio, the server does not need to search through all the txt files before inding the correct user's bio and sending it to the client, it simply accesses it directly. That's what I'm getting at. I think if there is one thing Microsoft should look into changes with in Windows 10 it would be the registry. I think settings for a program should be stored in the root directoory of the program's files rather than in the registry, such as how Linux works.
m
0
l
a c 633 $ Windows 7
October 14, 2014 1:18:14 PM

turkey3_scratch said:
@boosted1g: The thing is, using something such as a txt file renamed to perhaps .set for settings, no searching would be needed because programs themselves would store data on which file to open. Take MS Word for example, when I click msword.exe to run the file, it has to search the registry for entries that it specifies, particularly settings. Rather than searching for entires, would it not be easier for msword.exe to store data on the directory of settings and then access the .set file from that directory without even needing to search for the settings itself through a whole bunch of files?

Take a website for example (for you coders). If you use .txt files in the root directory of your public_html folder that store data on each user, such as let's say the user's bio, the server does not need to search through all the txt files before inding the correct user's bio and sending it to the client, it simply accesses it directly. That's what I'm getting at. I think if there is one thing Microsoft should look into changes with in Windows 10 it would be the registry. I think settings for a program should be stored in the root directoory of the program's files rather than in the registry, such as how Linux works.


As noted earlier, that is what .ini files used to do with earlier version of Windows. Each application had one or more.
They did away with that, in favor of a centralized Registry.

Given that a particular application or suite (Office) may have thousands of entries, a text file (.ini) may not be faster.
Also, the Registry provides a centralized place for shared resources. Fonts, for instance.

Example:
What fonts are installed? Well....lets read this applications .ini file to tell us where the fonts live, and then go read that location to see what actually exists.
Faster? Probably not.

Manipulating an application:
Each time you resize a window, those settings are written to the Reg. Next time you open that application, it knows where it was last time.
Writing/saving that info to a text file may well be slower.
m
0
l
!