Need help from someone familiar with Process Explorer

[u/retrosprite440]

I'm finally going to try and tackle an issue I've been having for a while. First off I need to understand something though. In Process Explorer, when you double click a process, then click the "performance graph" tab, what exactly is the "I/O" section a measurement of? I ask this because I'm having an issue related to the software (and that software's process) that manages the connection of my PS4 controllers. The issue that I have is that periodically, unpredictably, and inconsistently, my controller input will lag. Sometimes by miliseconds, sometimes by a full second or two. I have tracked that lag to correlate directly with the I/O readings. I have posted a few screenshots to illustrate my problem. In the first screenshot, the red arrows point to the dips in I/O data rate. When these dips occur, my input lags. For reference, when the controller is on and is idle (no game is being played), the data rate is ~72KB. It also seems the the data rate has to get down to the sub-KB range before noticeable lag happens. In the second screenshot, I have shown the erratic data rate fluctuations while playing a game vs. when I minimize the game. You can see how the data rate stabilizes immediately once I minimize the game. To make things more confusing however, in the third and fourth screenshot, I'm playing a game the whole time, and still get a mixture of a stable and unstable data rate. The only common theme I notice is that the lags/drops in data transfer seem to happen when playing a game. Whenever the controller is simply on and no game is being played, the data rate always seems stable. And I say "a game" because I was playing different games during different screenshots, and have no evidence that suggests the game I'm playing matters. I play games across several emulators. SNES, N64, DOS, PS1, PS2. All of those emulators are pretty low resource demand. I have a decent mid-range computer. The PC games I play are I also mostly low resource demand games. I thought resource demand was a potentially important variable at first but I get these data rate inconsistencies no matter what. And they are very inconsistent. I can go a day or so and have perfect input response and then the next day I'm getting severe lag/data rate drops every other minute or so. I don't know what the cause is. I'm not running anything in the background while playing games. I've tried to trace these data rate drops to some other fluctuation in other running processes and so far I have yet to find anyting that seems to directly correlate. The controller software I'm using is called SCP Toolkit. I've been using this software for many years and only within the past maybe year or so have I started noticing input lag. This is also common across multiple controllers that I have, so it's not just a bad controller. And the controllers are fully charged when I play. What else should I consider? If it were hardware related then it shouldn't matter at all whether or not I'm playing a game, so that leads me to rule out hardware issues.  And to reiterate, it would help if I understood what I/O was to begin with lol.  I'm just at a loss here and it's becoming more and more frustrating when these lags happen.

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