FRAPS limiting network speed

[kextyn]

I've been wondering why my network speed has been so slow lately. I used to easily get 50MB/sec or more from my file server and I've only been getting about 15MB/sec max (usually less.) I tried all sorts of tips and tricks for both my Vista PC and my Linux fileserver but found that I was getting good speeds from another PC on the network. So I started closing applications one by one to see if one was causing issues. It turned out to be FRAPS. I have the registered version (yes, I paid for it) and just by having it open (not recording or playing a game) it was severely limiting my network speed. I'm able to start transferring a very large file at about 13-15MB/sec and if I close FRAPS during the transfer it jumps up to ~80MB/sec. I have duplicated this several times and also tested with bandwidth testers (like iperf.)

Has anyone ever seen an issue like this with FRAPS? I suspect many people either wouldn't have a gigabit network with fast hard drives (300GB Velociraptor on the PC, 7 drive RAID array on the server) or they don't leave FRAPS running all the time. The only reason I run it all the time is because otherwise I'd forget to start it up and may miss an opportunity to record something. I contacted FRAPS but it's been a couple days and I haven't received a response.

Can anyone else test this? I'd like to know for sure if it's a FRAPS issue. I'm running Vista Ultimate x64 BTW.

 

[amddude]

FRAPS records to uncompressed avi, I would imagine it's just writing a lot of data to your drive at once. I doubt it's truly a network performance issue.

 

[kextyn]

As I said in my first post:

"I have the registered version (yes, I paid for it) and just by having it open (not recording or playing a game)"

I did have a friend test on his PCs who was also running 64bit Windows (although it was 7 and I'm running Vista) and he did not experience the same issue. I have restarted several times and can recreate the issue consistently.

 

[amddude]

My bad, maybe another dumb suggestion but are you network drivers up to date?

 

[kextyn]

Good question. I think they were updated using Windows Update but not sure how new they are. It's a new PC build (only a couple months old) and I'm pretty sure I picked up the latest drivers.