Explorer using 50% CPU - why?, doing what?

G

gibber

Gawd
Joined
Jul 16, 2007
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759
Is anybody else tired of how vague task manager is? Today explorer was putting a full load on one of my CPUs and wouldn't stop. Why oh why, after so many years of development, can't Windows tell you WTF is it DOING using that much CPU?!? :confused: I wasn't doing anything except I had a few idle IE windows open and one Open Office document just sitting there doing nothing. :eek:

Windows makes me want to pull my hair out, it's so frustrating. Why doesn't:

A) The GUI _always_ remain responsive and interactive, no matter what the PC is doing

B) If an application is going to take time to finish it's processing, ok, but why should it tie up anything else, and why doesn't it remain responsive, but tell you "busy doing xxx, please wait" and if it's going to take more than a second, show a progress bar?

C) Why isn't Task Manager more specific and tell you exactly what a process is doing - particularly something huge (does many different things) like Explorer?

D) If an application does not receive a response immediately, why doesn't it TELL YOU and ask if you would like to continue, or try something else instead, instead of just locking up???

BTW, I'm using Windows XP. I assume none of these issues are addressed in Windows 7?
 
use process explorer to see whats running under it. My guess is you have a nifty virus masking itself under a run32.dll
 
use process explorer to see whats running under it. My guess is you have a nifty virus masking itself under a run32.dll
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Or simply a bad 3rd-party hook/extension.
 
I found that an animated gif was causing the problem, even after it stopped:

ntdll.dll!RtlAllocateHeap+0x18c is the name of the thread. Memory leak I guess? But why does it continue even after closing the gif preview window? I can kill just that thread and everything seems fine again...
 
gibber said:
A) The GUI _always_ remain responsive and interactive, no matter what the PC is doing?
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That's not always the case with XP, but is with Windows 7. The new GDI stack is one of the greatest things about Windows 7.

gibber said:
B) If an application is going to take time to finish it's processing, ok, but why should it tie up anything else, and why doesn't it remain responsive, but tell you "busy doing xxx, please wait" and if it's going to take more than a second, show a progress bar?
Click to expand...

It's up the developers to make sure that the program and the GUI are in different threads, and it's also up to them to show any progress indicators.
 
Remember BeOS? That was almost 20 years ago now (1991) and AFAIK it fixed the problems I was complaining about in my first post...

800px-BeOS_Desktop.png
 
Hmm, I think I was mistaken about the .GIF file, I was double checking and narrowed it down to trying to view a folder with the "Thumbnail" view, then moved files until I found the particular .mpg that was causing it.

I've seen this sort of problem before on another windows system with different files - except in that case it wasn't a dual core system and it would hang explorer, by simply opening the folder in thumbnail view.

I'm not sure how it seemed to have been caused by the .GIF - but last night opening the .GIF seemed to cause the problem several times consecutively, but now that I've removed the video, the .GIF won't cause that problem any longer.
 
Snowknight26 said:
That's not always the case with XP, but is with Windows 7. The new GDI stack is one of the greatest things about Windows 7.

It's up the developers to make sure that the program and the GUI are in different threads, and it's also up to them to show any progress indicators.
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By "the developers" do you mean Microsoft? For the most part, these problems have been fairly specific to Windows, certainly, much worse on Windows, at least [than on Linux, or various UNIX flavors I've tried].

EDIT: I just did a quick google: about 62,700 for thumbnail view crashes windows explorer.
 
gibber said:
By "the developers" do you mean Microsoft?
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No, just developers in general.

gibber said:
Hmm, I think I was mistaken about the .GIF file, I was double checking and narrowed it down to trying to view a folder with the "Thumbnail" view, then moved files until I found the particular .mpg that was causing it.
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Sounds like you need to uninstall any 3rd party codecs or codec packs.
 
Sounds like you need to uninstall any 3rd party codecs or codec packs.
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This. And if you're claiming the Windows GUI is more fragile than Linux, you must not have used X11 for very long.
 
I had this problem with one of my xp computers and I had to disable thumbnail view to cure it. Depends on how many files, pictures, videos, etc you have that are trying to display a thumbnail.
 
Arainach said:
This. And if you're claiming the Windows GUI is more fragile than Linux, you must not have used X11 for very long.
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When you have Linux installed on hardware for which mature drivers have been written it does not run in fits and starts with frequent aggrivating pauses the way Windows does.
 
gibber said:
When you have Linux installed on hardware for which mature drivers have been written it does not run in fits and starts with frequent aggrivating pauses the way Windows does.
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If you're going to compare a modern version of Linux, stop comparing it against an 8-year-old version of Windows.
 
Arainach said:
This. And if you're claiming the Windows GUI is more fragile than Linux, you must not have used X11 for very long.
Click to expand...

I suppose I didn't really start using X11 heavily until 1997 when I got my first SGI workstation, which served as my main work system.
 
Arainach said:
If you're going to compare a modern version of Linux, stop comparing it against an 8-year-old version of Windows.
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Well, Vista sucked 5x worse than XP. And, did you not notice my reference to BeOS, which is much older than XP? Also, most of my experience with Linux was before Vista was released.

I will be pleasantly shocked if Windows 7 is more efficient than Windows XP, and does not freeze the GUI while waiting for hard drive interrupts, etc.
 
Now I'm glad I basically skipped Vista, to the same extent that I skipped Windows ME (I had one system with Windows ME, and I have one system with Vista (and about 5 or 6 with Windows XP). I will be upgrading or installing at least one system with Windows 7 soon :) My only major complaint with it is the continued price bracketing with higher prices for full featured versions (AFAIK at this point, without having tried it yet).

Tawnos said:
You certainly do ASSume.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx
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Thank you for the link, very encouraging - a quote from the page referenced:

"Desktop Responsiveness

Many have experienced scenarios where an application, or Windows itself, stops responding momentarily. This is type of a performance issue that can be impacted significantly by the performance of graphics in the PC. We categorize these as desktop responsiveness issues. Improving responsiveness, both in real terms and by avoiding non-responsive moments, is one of the key ways that performance is improved in the system. It is also hard to measure.

Measuring desktop responsiveness is a hard problem since a number of issues which affect responsiveness aren’t easily reproducible and there is a great variety of them. They are rarely caught by either kind of benchmark as these issues are dependent on real-world combinations of factors. For Windows 7 we spent a great deal of time looking at these performance glitches..."

---

EDIT: In case somebody can't tell, I'm being sincere, not sarcastic when I say thank you for that link...
 
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gibber said:
C) Why isn't Task Manager more specific and tell you exactly what a process is doing - particularly something huge (does many different things) like Explorer?
Click to expand...

download process explorer, run it, options -> replace task manager

voila
 
Arainach said:
Yeah, we're done here. Good riddance, troll.
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?!?!?? If you're going to be an _____ then please get the ___ out of my thread.

:(

I'm not a troll, IMHO Vista genuinely sucked and the majority of intelligent long time computer users agreed and advised others to stay away from Vista and just wait for the next version of Windows before leaving XP. That's what most businesses, IT departments, etc. have done also? Come on. :confused::confused::confused:

???

EDIT: Anyway - I'm sorry - I guess I was wrong - I thought prety much everyone agreed that Vista is lame and basically a step down from XP? One friend of mine who is an IT manager at a large corp. said that the "Ultimate" version is actually a significantly different build than the other versions and does not suck quite so much as the other versions, which, he would not use. But he actually liked Vista Ultimate somewhat and used it on one of his home machines. I imagine, after reading that article linked in an earlier post, that Windows 7 will be what everyone had hoped Vista would be, before they discovered how much of a let down it was?
 
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Alright, I'll bite.

Your first issue sounds like a bad codec. Explorer allows third party plugins to expand it's capabilities. One of these is obviously codec support for thumbnails. I would figure out what codec you installed that's causing this issue.

Now for your other concerns, about BeOS for example. This problem is due to third party plugin support. I have no idea if BeOS allowed plugins or not. (Never used it.) On my dual proc machine I had to figure out why every process kept having an affinity of one. It was caused by a codec that kept setting the affinity of it's host process to proccessor 0. Application developers can do crazy things when you allow them to run in your process space. Now should have explorer allowed such things? I don't know... I sent a very nice mail to the writers of that codec explaining that they should fix their multi-proc bugs, instead of just setting their affinity to 0 in the dll load. (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/03/21/399688.aspx)


As to your complaints about Vista, I'm sure you used it for a couple weeks to make an informed decision.

This post is made "AS IS" without warranties, and confers no rights
 
gibber said:
One friend of mine who is an IT manager at a large corp. said that the "Ultimate" version is actually a significantly different build than the other versions and does not suck quite so much as the other versions, which, he would not use.
Click to expand...

Bullshit.
 
I installed Windows 7, now my new PC is working great. Definately worth the $29 I paid for it [Windows 7].

I was having so many headaches with XP which seemed to be related to the SATA controllers / RAID / new Seagate SATA disk drives.

I did not even have to find a single driver myself, Windows 7 installed drivers for every piece of this system without even ASKING me, just worked. THIS is what Microsoft needed to do - I still think Vista was a hunk of junk, but I am digging Windows 7 a lot.
 
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