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Topic: «AWM 5.5b2 CPU Usage , High CPU usage with new features » on forum: Beta Testing   Views: 43275
 
Alexey Fadeyev
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 Posts: 1427
Joined: 09/30/2005
Posted: 11/03/2009 15:18:48
 
 
 David, thank you for the response.

*sigh* It would be astonishing if it wasn't so customary... actually, before releasing the update we checked this issue on several machines under different versions of Windows (XP/Vista/7 32/64-bit) - and found nothing extraordinary with the CPU utilization by the Explorer process. So that I suspect you have something in your software environment that produces the described effect on Explorer in combination with AWM.

What system utilities do you run constantly along with AWM? Could you try to unload them step by step to see if it has any effect on Explorer? Thanks!
 
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David Lomas
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 Posts: 377
Joined: 03/16/2006
Posted: 11/03/2009 15:36:36
 
 
 Well, the obvious culprit would be RMClock, which is a frequency scaler which I use to keep the CPU clock down at 1GHz when the machine is idle, as it drastically reduces the core temp and hence fan noise.

Now, RMClock has 'performance on demand', so as soon as a process starts consuming cycles, it starts to step up the frequency until it gets to the max of 2.2GHz in my current system.

What I've never seen before is a process which changes its CPU utilisation depending on the frequency - e.g. something like video encoding runs at 50% (single thread on a dual core chip) regardless of the CPU frequency - it will just take a lot longer if I leave it at 1GHz.

So I tried manually stepping the frequency up, and as I did, the explorer process utilisation went down - at 2.2GHz, it bottoms out at about 7%, down from 25% at 1GHz. If you are expecting the new version of AWM to be interacting with and causing explorer.exe to be 'busy' with something, then I guess that's not too bad. Whatever its doing, its obviously not too demanding, and just shows up at 25% because of RMClock. It doesn't cause the core to heat up or the fan speed to increase. Out of interest, did you see this kind of utilisation on your test systems, or was it more like 0%-2%, which is what I see with AWM unloaded?

I've quit nearly everything else and it hasn't made any difference. If I quit RMClock, the frequency is restored to its default 2.2GHz and the process accordingly drops to ~7%.

I will try a clean boot with as little loaded as possible and see if it makes a difference, but I suspect not - will post back if there's anything else to report.

Cheers,

Dave.
 
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David Lomas
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 Posts: 377
Joined: 03/16/2006
Posted: 11/03/2009 15:57:01
 
 
 Well, with nothing but services loaded (no antivirus or anything), I started AWM and saw explorer jump to 6%-7%. Then I loaded RMClock to drop the CPU to 1GHz; explorer went up to about 15%. Then with each system tray utility I started, explorer crept up - the biggest jump was IOBit SmartDefrag which pushes it from about 19% to 25%.

I presume AWM has to talk to explorer to duplicate the tray icons, as they are updated in synchrony, so it wouldn't surprise me if every additional tray utility adds an overhead.

Anyway, I'll leave it with you, unless there's anything else you want me to check on. As it is, its only noticeable if I open taskmanager, so I'm happy to stick with b2. If it can be improved in the future, then great. If not, its not causing any major problem. The only thing I can forsee is if the explorer process really was busy with something, would having AWM running and adding a few percent to its load make the desktop less responsive?

Cheers,

Dave.
 
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MGhell
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 Posts: 141
Joined: 11/15/2008
Posted: 11/04/2009 00:32:00
 
 
 Update: On my machine Actualwindowmanagercenter.exe CPU usage is neglectable and Explorer.exe is at about 2% CPU...

System:
DUAL WIN7 (32bit)/WIN10 PRO (64bit)
CPU Q9550S
4GB RAM
Nvidia 460GTX
 
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Ole Martin HÃ¥land
Registered user
 
 Posts: 3
Joined: 11/19/2009
Posted: 11/19/2009 05:53:19
 
 
 I have the same problem.

When AWH is running, explorer uses about 10-15& CPU, but usually about 15-16%

I have used Process Explorer (Sysinternals) to investigate more, and I found a tread called:
SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a that is using the CPU.
It's stack chages a lot, but it might look like this:
ntkrnlpa.exe+0x6e946
ntkrnlpa.exe!RtlUpcaseUnicodeString+0xbe
ntdll.dll!RtlFindCharInUnicodeString+0xc1
ntdll.dll!RtlHashUnicodeString+0x2a2
ntdll.dll!RtlDosApplyFileIsolationRedirection_Ustr+0x176
ntdll.dll!RtlMultiAppendUnicodeStringBuffer+0x326
ntdll.dll!RtlMultiAppendUnicodeStringBuffer+0x371
ntdll.dll!RtlMultiAppendUnicodeStringBuffer+0x18b
ntdll.dll!LdrLoadDll+0x2ce
ntdll.dll!LdrLoadDll+0x110
kernel32.dll!LoadLibraryExW+0xc8
kernel32.dll!LoadLibraryExA+0x1f
kernel32.dll!LoadLibraryA+0x2d
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x6d
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x14f
USER32.dll!DefWindowProcW+0x180
USER32.dll!DefWindowProcW+0x1cc
ntdll.dll!KiUserCallbackDispatcher+0x13
USER32.dll!SendMessageW+0x49
explorer.exe+0x6ef4
explorer.exe+0x6eaf
explorer.exe+0x6e14
explorer.exe+0x71aa
explorer.exe+0x70de
explorer.exe+0x7092
explorer.exe+0x1b5c
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x6d
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x14f
USER32.dll!IsWindowUnicode+0xa1
USER32.dll!CallWindowProcW+0x1b
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x6d
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x14f
USER32.dll!IsWindowUnicode+0xa1
USER32.dll!CallWindowProcW+0x1b
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x6d
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x14f
USER32.dll!IsWindowUnicode+0xa1
USER32.dll!CallWindowProcW+0x1b
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x6d
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x14f
USER32.dll!IsWindowUnicode+0xa1
USER32.dll!CallWindowProcW+0x1b
aimemb.dll+0x2a480
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x6d
USER32.dll!GetDC+0x14f
USER32.dll!DefWindowProcW+0x180
USER32.dll!GetGUIThreadInfo+0x55
ntdll.dll!KiUserCallbackDispatcher+0x13
USER32.dll!PeekMessageW+0x167
explorer.exe+0x19c1
explorer.exe+0xffd1
SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x3e9
kernel32.dll!GetModuleFileNameA+0x1ba

Following the TreadID, in Process Monitor (Sysinternals), it does not seem to do that much, 1000 events of 2000000.


I found that i I turn off "Multi-monitor Taskbar", then explorer drops to about 5%, but if I quit AWM, it drops to 0%
 
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David Lomas
Advanced user
 
 Posts: 377
Joined: 03/16/2006
Posted: 11/19/2009 08:29:53
 
 
 I have now built a new PC based on a Phenom II X4 945, and this problem has all but gone away. I can find the same thread you mentioned (shlwapi.dll), and of all the explorer.exe threads, its the one 'doing the most' - hundreds to thousands of context switches per second, but only about 0.5% CPU now. Its most common state is shown as Wait:WrUserRequest. But most threads under explorer.exe show negligible total user/kernel execution time, whereas shlwapi.dll is over 7 minutes in total (out of about 5 hours of uptime) - 2.3%.

So, perhaps whatever it is doing is particularly demanding on certain configurations - like yours and my old one. I guess it might be worth investigating which parts of AWM use features from this library, and see if there's a way of reducing it?
 
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olliman
Registered user
 
 Posts: 3
Joined: 11/19/2009
Posted: 11/20/2009 02:10:34
 
 
 My specs are by the way:
Microsoft Windows XP
Professional
Version 2002
Service Pack 3

Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz
772 MHz, 2.98 GB of RAM Physical Address Extentsion.

I'm connected to a domain.

Let me know if you need more details...
 
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Alexey Fadeyev
Administrator

Moderator
 
 Posts: 1427
Joined: 09/30/2005
Posted: 11/20/2009 13:39:24
 
 
 Ole, David,

Thank you for the valuable information! We will surely investigate this issue further and try to find an appropriate solution to diminish or completely remove the high CPU load, if it's possible.
 
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Alex Fadeyev
Administrator

Moderator
 
 Posts: 1427
Joined: 09/30/2005
Posted: 12/10/2009 12:36:51
 
 
 We have made some fixes and improvements in the just released beta 4 to reduce the CPU load when running AWM with the Multi-monitor Taskbar enabled - please check it out. Is the CPU load acceptable now?
 
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olliman
Registered user
 
 Posts: 3
Joined: 11/19/2009
Posted: 01/18/2010 01:11:00
 
 
 I'm now using AWM 6 beta 1, I can't remember when I installed it, but the CPU load has been fine for a while. I'll report back if the problem comes back.
 
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