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CPU running 30-50% while 99% idle Part 3

David Jørgensen — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:54:41 GMT

Here I am again, with part 3.
I was hoping that another part wouldn't be needed, but it turned out that my "fix" in part 2 didn't actually fix anything.

In fact, it came back the day after I had written part 2, and I have been trying to figure out why it was happening, and it seems that I indeed have found the cause of the 30-50% CPU usage.

My brother was visiting me this weekend, where we completed Dungeon Siege 2 and it's expansion pack. We have run through the first two chapters last month, and it was time to complete the game. At one point we completed Titan Quest and it's expansion in 1 day and 18 hours (game time), in a little less than 3 days. Crazy, but fun. :)

Anyways, my computer was running fine, and at some point during the weekend I had to copy over some data from my laptop to my computer, and what I noticed was that *RIGHT* after I had copied over the data, the 30-50% cpu happened. Again with the hardware interrupts. Because it happened right after I finished copying the data, I immediately started focusing on the onboard NIC (network interface card). So the first thing I tried was to actually just yank the ethernet cable out of the NIC, which in turn resulted in the Interrupts proces going down to 0.7%.

I tried to put the ethernet cable back into the same NIC, but the Interrupts proces immediately jumped to 30-50%. WTF. All this time it's been the NIC? how can this be?

Well, without trying to figure it out (my brother was here, remember), I just switched to the other NIC (my motherboard has two built-in NIC) and the Interrupts proces stayed at 0.7%.

I once again tried to copy over the same data as before, and the still the Interrupts proces stayed at 0.7%. While I am aware that it's only monday and I haven't tested it that much, I am pretty confident that the other NIC has been the problem all along. Why, I dont know yet, but if I get the time, I will try and investigate. It's just not going to be now.

So this is the NIC that *CAUSED* the fault:

Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.0)

And this is the NIC that works:

Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller

I'm really glad I have figured out what the cause was, and I am even more glad that my motherboard contains two NICs.
So if you are having the same problem as me, I suggest trying to yank the ethernet cable first to see if this is the cause, and then trying another NIC.

Good luck

CPU running 30-50% while 99% idle Part 2

David Jørgensen — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:23:10 GMT

So I seem to have located the source of the problem.

But before I burst out in a dance, yelling "PWNED PWNED PWNED, I GOT YOU!!!" at my computer, I will have to test my computer for a couple of more days. To be absolutely sure I will have to test it at least a week more, but so far things are going really well.. The computer haven't acted up like it did before, so that is always a good sign.

Before I present to you the solution to *my* specific problem I just have to mention the specs on my computer

Intel Core2 Duo E6850 @3.0 GHZ
ASUS P5K Deluxe motherboard
4 GB ram
BFG Geforce 8800 GTS 640mb ram
1x 200gb Western Digital
2x 320gb Western Digital
Lite-On DVDRW SHW-16H5S
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Gamer
Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1

That's it I guess. Don't know if I have forgotten anything, but I guess this will do for now.

My solution
Seeing as this is/was a hardware interrupt error, I first checked all my device drivers for all my hardware. They seemed to be in order. Newest versions bla bla bla etc. etc.

So I remember that every 20 or so minutes of inactivity my harddrives spin down. They go into power save mode. Which is okay. I dont know why I came to think of it, and I guess I dont care really. They usually spin up alright again. But the harddrives lead me somehow to think of the controller. Could the controller somehow be the reason for my computers Interrupt "malfunction"?

So without much thought to why this was happening, I went into the Device Manager, found the "Storage Controllers" section, and located the IDE Controller as shown below.

Click to view original image

Then I *deleted* the IDE controller. Yup. I just removed it. From my many years of experience, whenever some hardware is manually removed from the Device Manager, after windows restarts, it will reinstall the driver again.

So my computer restarted and this time it also installed the driver again.
I went about my business and did what I always do. And this went on for a couple of days. No slowdowns has happened since. I love it. :)

But like I mentioned earlier, I still need at least a week of testing, before I claim this as the *solution* to my problem.

/Cheers

CPU running 30-50% while 99% idle Part 1

David Jørgensen — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:18:46 GMT

I have this problem with my computer.

I boot up my machine, I play around a little, doing whatever i want to do. Be it practicing some guitar lessons, writing blog posts, playing games, watching movies.. Whatever.

If I let my machine stand without doing anything, it will eventually start eating 30-50% of my cpu. This usually happens if I have been using my computer, and then go downstairs making and eating dinner, and then coming back upstairs to watch movies or whatever. In order for me to watch the movie I had to restart the computer and begin the movie as soon as the O/S was loaded.

For whatever reason it consumes 30-50% cpu, but the funny thing is. When I open the windows task manager it tells me that the cpu is 90% idle, but the status bar tells me that its using anything from 30-50% cpu. Like the screenshot below.

Click to view original image

Seeing as this has gone on for too long, and that movies cannot be played properly when this is happening I have now decided to do something about it.

Being sort of geek when it comes to computers, I already know that there are severel kick ass tools around that can do a lot more than windows built in functionality. So i knew that there was a tool called "Process Explorer".

So I download it and run it (no installation is needed), and immediately I notice that the REAL idle cpu is only 52% while a proces called "Interrupts" uses 39% as shown below.

Click to view original image

Apparently these hardware interrupts are not being reported to the windows task manager, and as such do not appear in it. However, it is now possible to actually find the source of the conflict.

All I have to do now is locate the hardware that is conflicting and do something about it. :)

Stay tuned.

Hi dad

David Jørgensen — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:07:39 GMT

No, it's not the band D.A.D. i'm referring to, although they are pretty good..

I'm referring to the fact that i am now "scheduled" to become a father. How sick is that? haha.
My girlfriend is scheduled to deliver in december, so it will be a little christmas gift for us.

We will know the gender some time mid-july.

I guess the year 2008 will be life changing in more than one way.
Cya

USA here we come

David Jørgensen — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:30:02 GMT

So, I just accepted a travel offer I got from a travelling agency.

My girlfriend and I are going to West USA in late August until mid September. We will arrive in Las Vegas, rent a car and check out most of the west.
The places below are already in our travelling schedule

Death Valley
Mammoth Lake
Yosemite National Park
San Francisco
Santa Barbara
Los Angeles
Palm Springs
Grand Canyon National Park
Monument Valley
Las Vegas and back home

We are really looking forward to this three week holiday. It seems that we will have our hands full for sure.
I'm sure it will be fantastic. :)

Edit: The car we are going to rent has now been secured.

Ford Mustang Convertible

Joined a band

David Jørgensen — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:38:17 GMT

After a 10 year break from my guitar playing, I have now teamed up with my uncle and have formed a band.
We are four guys having a lot of fun and rocking very hard. The band has no name yet, so any suggestions are welcome and will be considered. :-)

To begin with we will be playing cover versions of other artists songs. This is to get to know eachother on a musical level, and find out what our strengths and weaknesses are, and when we are hard rocking we may consider writing some of our own stuff.

It's been 10 years since I last touched my guitars and reckoning that I'm a bit rusty, I have begun extensive training and practice, and on this subject I'd like to promote a site I stumpled upon while surfing for songs to play.

The site is called GuitarMasterClass, and it has LOADS of learning videos, theory lessons and there are probably a lot of other things as well, but since I just joined, I have no idea yet. However, it's fantastic, and if you are good enough you can even create your own lessons and maybe make some money on the side as a teacher.

It will set you back around ~9 USD or ~40 DKK a month (you pay 6 months in advance), but so far I believe it's well worth the value.

I love it,
Peace out!

New host

David Jørgensen — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:33:30 GMT

Yesterday I bought myself some space on a webhost called Surftown. I choose Surftown since they support MSSQL and .NET, and Surftown proclaims that their configurationmanager is most extensive manager in the kingdom. I don't know whether or not this is true, since I have been hosted at my company, but they sure have a lot of configuration options, which also makes it a bit harder to get into.

However, it seems to be working now. Not that I have testet everything yet, but most seems to be working. If you find something not working, please tell me. :-)

On this subject, I want to thank Mr. Jakob Borg for his assistance where needed, including the DNS configuration, which I now understand completely. :)

Welcome to the new world!

It is OFFICIAL

David Jørgensen — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:51:43 GMT

It is now official. I have decided to leave HelloGroup and HelloWeb, and go look for something else to do.

This has definately been one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made, but I feel the need and urge to get out in the big and dangerous world. I have been employed at HelloWeb almost 5 years (formerly known as Juul & Stejle), and it has been a good and exciting time here.

My plan is to go out and find another job where I can practice my skills as a developer, and hopefully my lust and the fun of coding will return to me. If not, I might have to go out and find a job doing something completely different.

It's all very scary, and somewhat exciting, and when the official mail was sent around yesterday, I began to realize WTF I am doing. I'm leaving all my kick-ass colleagues. I'll miss you guys!

Since I can't ask you to do it, I will do it myself. :-)

Good luck mofo!

First post in 2008.. yay

David Jørgensen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:46:42 GMT

Having been here at work for 12 hours straight I thought i should take a break, and suddenly realised that my blog has been quiet for too long. This must change, so this is my first post in 2008, and hopefully many more will come.

We have to launch a new version of Elsparefonden's MinBolig, which is a super cool project, and the new version is soooo über cool, you'll wet your pants.

Hope everybody will enjoy this super cool new Welcome application which has taken far too long to implement, but as Adobe says: "Motion Matters".

Cheers.

Who am i? and why?

David Jørgensen — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 02:00:57 GMT

Hi there.

I'm David. I am 27 years old and living with my girlfriend. We've been together since 1999.
I'm working as a developer at Juul & Stejle (www.stejle.dk) located in Denmark where I have been working since june 2002. We specialize in web applications and their integration with other systems to expose content from many different kinds of systems. We mainly develop our web applications in asp.net 2.0 (C# only btw), but we also have some sites still running on .net 1.1 and ASP 3.

I am a backend developer. I can do a little HTML but it's not anything very advanced, and I know even less about designing, which is also the reason you will see C# posts and not so much of the other stuff. ;-)

I have been working on many big (and not so big) projects, always trying to expand my horizon to challenge myself to become a better programmer.

Now you are probably wondering why I've gotten myself a blog, and what do I even have on my mind?
Well, blogs has been around for quite a while, and although I've been thinking nothing of it, during my work on a website we just recently developed and launched (www.avisen.dk) I came to realize that this whole blogging community is fun, interesting, and without knowing it, I was blogging "in my head". I was thinking about this and that, and if I had my own blog I would definately write this and that.

As I said www.avisen.dk is a project we've just recently launched. It's based on a heavily modified Community Server, which we have been extending with a lot of cool features, and just changing things to fit our needs. I think CS is superb. We wanted to create a newspaper site where users can comment on articles written by journalists, and even have their own blog. We want to create the largest blogging community in Denmark, and although we have launched the site, we are still working to make it better. Each day i see new features being added to make the site as user friendly as possible. And in time I am positive that we are going to succeed.

You're wondering: "If you've just lauched an entire blogging community for everybody, why dont you just blog on www.avisen.dk?".
To be perfectly honest I do have a blog on www.avisen.dk. And I do think that I'm going to use it. But I really wanted to not only blog, but blog on my very own site. A site that, for somewhat years, only had a page with a link to "boycott starforce". I wanted to do something with my site, and I want to expand my site with new cool features which I cannot do on avisen.dk. As I've said earlier. I want to challenge myself and become a better developer. Btw, I forgot to mention that although I've been working quite a lot on CS I thought it would be a bit overkill to use it on my 'little' site.

Therefore I'm using SubText, which, like CS, is an open-source based blogging system. SubText works GREAT, and I was wonderfully surprised when I first started up the site with nothing but an empty database.
I was welcomed with this mighty fine tutorial which created all tables, stored procedures and what not. And right away I could start blogging. Now THAT'S how it should be done. GREAT WORK!
Like I mentioned previously I'm NOT that good at HTML/design, so for the time being I'll be using a standard skin, until I find something better, or learn design and HTML. ;-)

While I'm at it I might as well mention another site which we've just launched: www.zecco.com. A free stock market community where you can trade stocks for free. Zecco = ZEro Commition COst (only available to people in USA). Also built on CS (of course HEAVILY modified).

What am I going to blog about?
Mostly I'm going to blog about programming issues, solutions, tools I use in my work, stuff like that, but I'm also going to blog about some more personal stuff like my life, my girlfriend (if she lets me. LOL!) and what not. Whatever is on my mind really. Because in my later years, a lot has been going on in my mind. Which is quite a change for me.

Some (you know who you are, SKH) may just say I'm getting old and fuzzy about everything.
Others may say I'm just opening up for all that I've been holding back. I like to think I'm in the latter part. :-)

Anyways, check back and see whats going on.
/David