System and Interrupts causing high CPU

Question

Under Process Explorer, I noticed that System -- and occasionally Interrupts -- are taking between 5% and 20% CPU constantly, for hours on end. This is resulting in weird video playback problems. (Audio files have 'gaps' and YouTube videos have pauses in them.)

This problem has been happening for a while. Sometimes, a restart fixes it, IIRC. I also recently upgraded to a 1920x1080 monitor... But this shouldn't have any affect on audio. I also just disabled ReadyBoost (which I also got recently).

I killed PeerBlock and uTorrent, and this still continues to happen; previously, killing them was enough to get my CPU back down to ~0%.

My CPU temperature is ~55 C and my HDD is at <40 C.

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So it is uTorrent's fault (or PeerBlock or Comodo).

Solution

Look carefully at this picture, what the worst thing that you can spot?

That should be ndis, which stands for network driver interface specification.

Wait, what... Network, that's right:

So it is uTorrent's fault (or PeerBlock or Comodo).

So, hmm, the problem is indeed provoked by network activity. And it does something with the driver interface, that's right because firewalls add class filters to driver interfaces.

So, the correct way to proceed is to get rid of those filters, which has proven to work for me:

1. Get rid of your Comodo firewall, PeerBlock and other network related filters.
2. Get rid of your network card (from device manager) and remove its drivers.
3. Shut down your computer.
4. Remove the network card.
5. Boot your computer.
6. Ensure the network card is gone from the Device Manager, under the options at the top you can select to show hidden devices; remove any hidden network card devices you come across.
7. Shut down your computer.
8. Insert the network card again.
9. Get the newest drivers for your network card, install them.
10. Reboot again to make sure they are cleanly loaded.
11. Test your software again, then consider an alternate firewall.

Been through worse issues, done the above steps to get rid of Comodo.

Comments

[Moab]

Get to the cause of high cpu usage due to Interrupts how To here....msfn.org/board/topic/…

[Mateen Ulhaq]

@AndrejaKo I tried it out and it happens whenever uTorrent runs (experience) -- LatencyMon confirms that.

[user3660103]

@muntoo OK. Did you try getting the newest driver for your netwoerk card from its chipset manufacturer? Which network card do you have? Check in device manager any options for hardware processing and work off-load and experiment with them. In general, having card do as much processing as possible should speed things up, but you should try turning some of the options off too, in case something isn't working correctly at the cards side. Also, post image of available settings in device manager for it.

[user3660103]

@muntoo Also, once you start recording, switch to drivers tab and show us what is happening there. It should show us exactly which drivers are taking most time to do their processing.

[Tamara Wijsman]

@AndrejaKo: This is most likely related to ahrdware. Do you have statistics for that or are you just guessing? Thanks for the LatencyMon screenshot.

[Tamara Wijsman]

Erm... How is this relevant to the question?

[Wasted_Coder]

I had this issue on a laptop. Made the laptop unusable during CD/DVD reading operations. This also shows up as high Interrupts.