Picard 1.4.2 consistently creates excessive disk use and causes hard faults regardless of configuration or other installed or running software. The issue is certainly magnified when any other running application requires any disk access.

I have been able to recreate the issue on a VM (Hyper-V) and on a newly installed bare bones system without any other installed software (same hardware listed above). I have run through the same steps with and without various size paging files. I have moved the music files to another disk that contained no other data. The only variable appears to be type of music file. FLAC files cause 5-10x the impact as MP3 files and the impact appears to be loosely proportional to the size/bitrate of the MP3 file.

The issue appears when I add files to the left side pane. I used the same 1000 files in varying number. As soon as I execute "scan" the system goes to 100% disk use. If there are several files (10 or more), hard faults start to grow for "picard.exe" and then quickly reduce.

When I attempt to save after the files are matched, I can see multiple instances of "picard.exe" as well as 100% disk use and growing hard faults. In a specific sequence I have repeated I use ~100 files (50 FLAC, 50 MP3 @320) for a single band. All files match to 7-8 complete albums. After executing save Picard becomes unresponsive for 10-15 minutes with 100% disk use and 10+ disk queue for the entire time. Also, hard faults grow to ~150 though RAM is never above 25% in use and page file is not in use.

I have done additional testing on a fully installed system and I can launch several disk intensive applications that do not show performance degrade though it does significantly impact Picard causing the save to complete in more than 2x as long.

Picard is not just slow, it appears as a hung task and Windows reports it as non-responsive.  During this time the UI can not be used and will not respond via task manager.  However, under Resource Monitor it shows each individual file accessed by "picard.exe" with a 5-10 second pause between each new file.  The Picard activities eventually complete and the program goes back to available.  If other programs are running they are not impacted in terms of responsiveness or performance even when accessing the same physical disk.

This issue is identical using Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and all versions of Windows 10 and does not change whether other programs are installed or loaded.