MushroomNZ said:
i have windows XP SP3 on an AMD dual core CPU
this application is a news feed but uses 7 - 15 % of the cpu even when
no news is coming in. ive checked I/O with microsoft network monitor
and indeed no strange I/O to from the host. the handle number is
steady when displayed in "performance " as is disk I/O steady. the
people that wrote the application cant duplicate it on their machine.
BTW it has nothing to do with internet explorer . any ideas why it
would do this ?
You want us to remotely diagnose the behaviors an UNKNOWN application
when its own developer can't help you?
So is the process for this unidentified and vertical market "news feed"
application that is constantly consuming around 15% of the CPU's time?
Or is it for some other process? You never even gave the name of the
process so anyone else would know if you correctly targeted the process
for your mystery app or if it was a process for something else.
Just because no articles are showing up doesn't mean this mystery app is
not doing anything. Defragging a partition generates lots of CPU usage
and file I/O but you won't see any difference yourself nor do you see
windows opening and closing to fly by your face as their sectors get
moved around. You might see a dull progress window but even that is not
required for a defrag to proceed. So how do YOU know that the program
is not doing anything? Not seeing new articles does NOT prove the
program is not doing anything.
It could be doing a lot but the net result is no new articles were
found. It could be polling a ton of sites to which you chose to
subscribe to find if there are new articles there and all that polling
and generating network traffic will obviously consume some CPU time.
Maybe this mystery app has filters so you are getting articles but then
hiding or deleting them with the filters so that would explain the disk
activity for the file I/O.
So did you ever test yanking the NIC cable or disabling the NIC devices
in the OS to block this mystery app from ever establishing any network
connections to see if the CPU usage for it happens to disappear? I
don't know what is the "microsoft network monitor" that you mention
since it is not included in Windows XP. Maybe there is network traffic
but under a threshold for this monitor to even show a blip (i.e., the
volume is under the radar). Did you check your router's log or your 3rd
party firewall's log (since Windows Firewall doesn't have one) to see if
any connections were made during the busy time for this mystery app?
How about using SysInternals' TCPview to check for connections?
Also, it's quite possible that this mystery app is expiring old locally
cached articles, reindexing them, or doing something with the content of
all those previously retrieved feeds. Do it have a "flush" function
where you can wipe its local cache or purge its database of all old
articles?
Impossible to tell you what to do with the mystery application regarding
what options it provides or what behavior is expected. If it is some
vertical market app (i.e., it has very few users and is targeted for an
extremely narrow populace of users), all you'll get here is a slew of
guesses. Since you have the app along with any documentation for it and
have contact with its author, you can make better guesses than we.
