High CPU - Long loading time for program ?

[drdrew]

Short and sweet:

BabasChess is a program I use all the time to play chess and only recently it has been taking longer and longer to load the higher the uptime for XP SP3. When XP first loads, the program takes 1 second to load, but if I leave my computer on for several days, it will eventually take 7 seconds to load and use 50% CPU just while loading. Memory usage stays around 15mb no matter what. If spyware and malware and viruses are all ruled out (hypothetically), what else could cause this to happen each time you restart XP?

Assume:

Just defragmented HD, cleaned registry, scanned for malware (KIS 2010, Spy. Doc, Antivir), no other program has same symptoms, minimal programs booting and running in background, memory passed Memtest86

AMD X2 3800

2Gb DDR Memory

8500 GT

Seasonic 500W

300Gb + 250Gb SATAII HD

[MeddleMan]

Does it use any Java based platforms in anyway? Java animations etc? Java for some reason will run slower (thus load slower) everytime it is reset or reloaded. So you run and close the same program many times a day?

[soldier1st]

i don't think it uses java at all, also when it starts to lag run process monitor on it and see what it is touching, try temperarily disabling kis 2010 or any realtime security software and see if that fixes it, security software can cause lag on apps as it is scanning it.

[drdrew]

Before I came back to see your replies, I actually just found my old copy of Process Explorer and decided to see if there were updates and found Process Monitor! Now that my computer has been up for 4 days or so, it seems to take 9 seconds to load Babaschess! In Process Monitor (I filtered everything else out) it appears to access BC's registry many, many times when opening or closing the program (among other things).

KIS2010 is the only real-time AV I use (the others are on-demand) I use and I tried disabling every process once when testing what the culprit could be including that one, and it didn't help at all. :(

Now I am going to restart and run Process Monitor again to see the difference when BC loads in 1 second. I'll report back in a bit.

[drdrew]

I didn't see an edit button on my last post, so I had to make a new one... sorry.

The FILTERED Process Monitor logs seem to be very near the same - lots of Reg inquiries and whatnot. I need to wait a few days until the load time goes back to a high level to redo the Unfiltered test so I can see Everything else going on that may shine some light on this. It just seems to take an extra 8 seconds to load the same stuff with the filtered scan and that doesn't make sense since the CPU and other hardware don't change! As I said, this is the only program that exhibits these symptoms so I doubt it is malware, some hardware issue, or a global XP issue. Nothing gets logged in my Event Log either.

I can upload the PM logs when I redo the tests to collect all possible info if that would help someone help me!

Thanks!!!

[MeddleMan]

Going off on a tangent here, and this could be off the mark by about 10 lightyears, but how is your computer doing cooling wise. If your CPU or anything for that matter, is getting too hot it will naturally run things slowly. Or burn up. Or both. If my northbridge was flat I could fry an egg on it. THATS how hot it was once. Still waiting on my parts shipment to replace the simple aluminium heatsink.

[drdrew]

It does run pretty hot despite my XP-90 12cm fan on the CPU, and 12 cm intake and outtake fans. Idle for System is 42'c and CPU is 45'C - and that temperature is the same as when BC runs in 1 second or 9. BC's load time seems to increase linearly with time. I don't doubt my temps are high, but no other programs are having similar issues and my temp when loading BC 3 days from now will be no higher than they are now. I also feel like this issue is relatively recent and I've had the same computer rig for 4 years now... Thanks for thinking of things for me - you may be right - but who knows!

[soldier1st]

in task manager try increasing the process priority to above normal when it goes slow as that may help or at least partially point to a possible culprit.

[drdrew]

I've redone the Process Monitor test without filtering anything and then exported and cropped out anything from before and after Babaschess loading for both the long and short times. The result is 2 csv files (Excel) which I would upload if someone is willing to take a look for me. Right now I am comparing them in both processes and time to see where the long test needs its time. The long test does take 500 or so extra Excel lines which makes sense but when the total is 20700 or 21200, that result may not be significant.

I'll look into the Process priority if this test leads me into a brick wall. 6 seconds might not be enough time to click on the process, change the priority and see a result. And I believe that resets the next time you start the program, but maybe there's a utility that will let you set the priority indefinitely.

[drdrew]

Actually looking at the WHOLE duration for both long and short tests with the Relative Time and Duration columns shown in Process Monitor may have helped the most. I see for the long test that many more Explorer references are made before the actual loading of Babaschess. The actual Babaschess process loading seems to take roughly the same amount of time. The difference seems to be a registry reference to:

EnableDHCP, LeaseObtained Time, LeaseTerminates time, DhcpServer, DhcpServer, Linkage Bind.... over and over throughout the long load and seemingly fewer times in the short load. It's about 3 seconds before Babaschess begins to load in the long load and .9 seconds in the short load. It seems like it is a Network issue more than anything else because Babaschess is a Net chess program.

Does that seem like a reasonable culprit?

[MeddleMan]

As much as I want to help you, and I will (hoping I can make some some sense of any of the data you are willing to upload) but there is still some niggling voice going on in my mind saying,"It's just 7 extra seconds for a 'chess' game. How is that so bad?". But I do understand how special it must be to you, as I'm guessing you could kick my butt in chess anyday. Plus I know how annoying it is when SPORE kept crashing on me. Let's hope THAT doesn't start happening. But yes, send us the data when it's finished and we'll see if we can get to the bottom of this.

Btw, instead of keeping the computer on for 7 days straight (I come from a family that doesn't like to waste resources; water, electricity, fuel, etc) which on average 33% (2 and 1/3 of a whole day or 56 hrs) is spent by you sleeping anyway (assuming you get 8 hours of sleep every night) is there any difference in the loading time when you put the comeputer on to hibernate? I find hibernation loads much faster than normally starting up. Maybe hibernation will sort of "fool" the chess game into believing it's shutdown but actually isn't, and then loads instantly the next time. Which brings me to another thing: How fast does you computer start up, from pushing the button and it getting to all programs loaded on the desktop and ready to go?

PS. Just thought of something, do you actually close the chess game everytime you finish with it? When it's "closed" check your taskbar in case it might be there. Like uTorrent, you press X and it's still there. Sometimes. Although I don't actually see any reason as to why a taskbar'd prog shouldd load any slower when legally it's still 'open', I do not know, but again we should explore all avenues if we are to solve this little dilemma.

Cheers, Meddleman

[drdrew]

Hey thanks for taking the time to reply! 7 seconds isn't that big a deal, but the next day it took 9 seconds to load and unload, so I assume it will keep increasing linearly which seems to be the deal. I'm not that good at chess - it just is fun to watch the 2000+ rated players and GMs play, and play every once in awhile. Yeah I know I shouldn't keep the computer on while I'm not using it, but I do use Utorrent and like to seed and download overnight. Also, my computer isn't the quickest to bootup - usually over a minute til it's finished loading and usable.

I'm not sure if Hibernation will let me keep Utorrent running, but I do know it will cost me 2Gb of disc space to do that (I can spare it now but sometime I may be annoyed I don't have those 2Gb. When I close the program it does close (nothing in Task manager), but it takes as long as it does to load to close (if that makes sense).

Here is the link to the two Process Monitor logs and PM itself (in case you don't have it or don't feel like finding it on the web): http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?jnzjjznwzwm

Thank you to all who take the time to look into this for me!

[soldier1st]

in the short one you have peer guardian 2 but in the long one it looks like your connected to a domain and it seems like you have kaspersky+avira and peer guardian 2 is not running, by any chance do you have any network drives attached? also under both traces it seems explorer is trying to close an invalid name key which is resulting in an invalid handle and csrss is quering the assembly files which are .net related which it can't find also do you have Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)? as that is good to have in case apps need it,also what .net version do you have? search for .NET Version Detector 2009 as that will tell you which one you got.also do you have latest directx?

[drdrew]

Thanks for the reply and looking at the logs for me! I think I actually forgot I closed Peer Guardian in the long one and so I didn't make the same setup in the short one (poor job at scientific method for a former Bio Major!). But I have tested the situation with Peer Guardian/KIS running and not running, and both result the same way. I do have MS Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistrib x86, and only installed that recently to work with a program I use. Should I try uninstalling it since I really don't need that program anymore? I have DirectX 9.0c and .Net 1.1, 2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2, and 3.5 SP1.

My hunch (and I could be way off here) is that it is Network related and that repairing my network every so often may "restore" the BC load time back to normal. We'll see in a couple of days... I also restored my USB Wifi Network adapter's settings back to default, as I had turned on Nitro mode sometime back thinking it would make my Net faster - but I'm sure that was wrong and now it's off.

[soldier1st]

well the game is networking based so if something is causing a network issue that could slow down any other network based appslike your game and no i would leave the visual as you never know when you may need it sides it only ads a few mb's worth of files.

[drdrew]

Well, I've had no luck with anything I've tried... :( My only thought was reinstalling XP, but maybe that effort wouldn't even solve it, I don't know. I've tried hibernating and coming back, logging off then coming back, repairing the Network, running Registry Mechanic, CCleaner, reinstalling Babaschess, kicking my computer (no wait I didn't try that yet) and nothing has worked. The answer has got to lie in the PM logs but I don't know where. Restarting the computer fixes the long bootup and high CPU usage for awhile and then it seems to gradually increase. No one else has reported this issue with the program that I can find so I assume it's just me!

Ideas?!

Thank you for your help!

[soldier1st]

perhaps try upgrading to 7 and see if that helps?

[drdrew]

I have 7 on another partition on another disk- I may test this out on that sometime to see if it is a hardware or software problem. Changing gears a bit: I just don't love 7 as much as XP believe it or not. While 7 has some nifty features, I don't really like the new taskbar's wider buttons and more intrusive overall width (I know you can use small buttons on it). I don't really see the point of seeing small snapshots of the windows I have open since text takes less room and is easier to distinguish, and my computer can run Aero and I wouldn't run 7 without it but I find that on white backgrounds such as Firefox's favorites list that I always have open, the text is annoying to read. So even though I have 7, I am in no rush to go all the way in that direction. I know this isn't a bash 7 thread, but I wanted to vent a bit on it and definitely think there are tremendous improvements in bootup, memory usage and speed (over Vista), and the Jump lists are nice. I use Truelaunchbar in XP and have my own customizable menus with favorite folders in one, as well as a Weather icon that has a 5day forecast in its menu so XP is decently customized already. Anyhoo, IMHO, XP>7>98>95>3.1>Vista (haha).

[soldier1st]

could you test it in a virtual machine?and i only suggested trying 7 with that app to see if maybe it don't like XP afterawhile or something.

[drdrew]

I could... I just happen to believe it isn't a problem with XP since I never had this problem before with XP before this year and no one else on the Net has mentioned this problem. The virtual machine would use virtual hardware that would not give me real feedback about my actual computer. So using 7 in a virtual machine wouldn't really solve anything either. I could just use 7 on another partition as I mentioned to see how it fairs. If it has the same problem, then it is a hardware issue; if it works fine, then it could be a reason to reinstall XP.

[soldier1st]

well thats a good idea so report back when you can about your findings. also did it not work after sp3 or sp2 or even sp1?

[drdrew]

Just to finish this story... the culprit was most definitely Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 - either the particular version I was using (I have since updated it) or the Application Control "feature" - I am not sure which was more of the issue. I have added programs like Babaschess to KIS's Exclusion list and it once again loads in 1-2 seconds all the time - not just after booting. Before, I noticed that the Virtual Memory ballooned out for one of KIS's avp processes as each day passed so that seems logical that it was the problem since Babaschess's loading time did the same sort of ballooning. Updating the KIS program itself (not the defs) seemed to make the VM usage much more reasonable and therefore has helped tremendously with this issue!

Thanks to all who contributed! ;)

[soldier1st]

security software can cause issues like that.