High cpu usage from scrolling through webpages?

[mkygod]

Since i run dual screen, i would somtimes have a video playing fullscreen on a monitor while i do stuff on the other monitor. I noticed the video would skip occasionally while all i was doing was scrolling down to read news on sites like Techreport and Hardocp.

So i open up task manager and look up the process for my browser and find that scrolling through pages can kick the cpu usage up to 20 to 40 percent, depending on how much graphics is on the site. This happens in IE as well as Firefox. Is this normal? How can i remedy this? Any help would be appreciated.

Here's my configuration:

Athlon 3200+ @ 2.4ghz
msi neo2 platinum nforce3 939pin
2 x 512mb pc3500 Kingmax
PNY Geforce 6800 128mb @ 380/760
WinXP w/ sp2
Dual-view mode on 2 lcds running at native @ 1280x1024 60hz (vga and dvi)

 

[6000SUX]

Maybe your graphics card is running out of steam powering all of that.

 

[mkygod]

You think its the video card? I would think a 128mb video card with the high ramdac of a geforce 6 series would be able to run dual view w/o a sweat.

I have the 6800 o/c very conservatively. I also have the 4 piplines unlocked but that should only affect gaming. Havent had any corrupt textures when gaming.

What else could it be?

Edit: I tried single display mode, and it did not seem to help the cpu usage at all.

 

[stevty2889]

Have you looked in task manager to see what program was using up the CPU? Have you run memtest to check your memory? It sounds a lot like it could be spyware or a virus as well, what programs do you have for that? I run dual monitors as well, you certainly shouldn't be having those issues with that system..

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: mkygod
You think its the video card? I would think a 128mb video card with the high ramdac of a geforce 6 series would be able to run dual view w/o a sweat.

I have the 6800 o/c very conservatively. I also have the 4 piplines unlocked but that should only affect gaming. Havent had any corrupt textures when gaming.

What else could it be?

Edit: I tried single display mode, and it did not seem to help the cpu usage at all.

I was thinking specifically about the video. Don't get me wrong, that's an excellent midrange card-- I have an unlocked PNY Verto 128MB 6800 in my girlfriend's computer right now. Isn't the PureVideo or whatever supposedly broken on these cards, and did they ever release a driver update for that? I'm assuming you have all the latest drivers.

 

[kobymu]

try without flash animation, for some reason (bad coded web site?) some web site with flash animation can do that. altough not all.....

/edit
"try without flash animation" = try viewing the same web page without the flash plugin.

 

[mkygod]

Originally posted by: stevty2889
Have you looked in task manager to see what program was using up the CPU? Have you run memtest to check your memory? It sounds a lot like it could be spyware or a virus as well, what programs do you have for that? I run dual monitors as well, you certainly shouldn't be having those issues with that system..

Yeah i did go to task manager, it was iexplorer.exe that was taking up the cpu and firefox when i was running firefox. I ran memtest a few days ago for about 5 passes and there were no errors. I have spyware blaster installed, and i ran adaware, spybot, and hijack earlier this week. I found nothing but some harmless cookies. All these programs were up to date.

 

[mkygod]

Originally posted by: 6000SUX
I was thinking specifically about the video. Don't get me wrong, that's an excellent midrange card-- I have an unlocked PNY Verto 128MB 6800 in my girlfriend's computer right now. Isn't the PureVideo or whatever supposedly broken on these cards, and did they ever release a driver update for that? I'm assuming you have all the latest drivers.

It has nothing to do with the 6800's video acceleration. The cpu usage happens even when im NOT playing a video. Yeah, i have the latest official drivers, 71.89

The 6800agp lacks wmv9 acceleration which is one of the purevideo features.

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: mkygod

Originally posted by: 6000SUX
I was thinking specifically about the video. Don't get me wrong, that's an excellent midrange card-- I have an unlocked PNY Verto 128MB 6800 in my girlfriend's computer right now. Isn't the PureVideo or whatever supposedly broken on these cards, and did they ever release a driver update for that? I'm assuming you have all the latest drivers.

It has nothing to do with the 6800's video acceleration. The cpu usage happens even when im NOT playing a video.

Aha. Well, no, that's not normal, especially in Firefox. IE will sometimes re-lay-out the page when you scroll if the page is rife with fancy DHTML, but Firefox and Mozilla are usually better. I second the motion that Flash or Java applets may be the culprit. You have to remember that browser objects sit in holes "punched" in the page, and are completely free to manage their own screen region, including buffering. That means that every time you scroll, even one pixel, the browser tells each applet/object to repaint itself, because otherwise the OS wouldn't know what to draw for that region of the screen. So it's not a problem with anything but the crappy, overloaded page, maybe.

 

[6000SUX]

I tried both those sites on my girlfriend's machine, and they're okay. Did you try disabling the overclock temporarily?

 

[mkygod]

Ok, i tried going to a site that doesnt have any java or flash, and the cpu consumption went down by half, but its still around 20% usage when scrolling up and down.

Yeah the first thing i did was turn off overclocking on my card. Thanks for tryin to help!

 

[stevty2889]

I get around 20% CPU usage by IE when scrolling up and down pages too, so that looks more normal, does it still lag on you though?

 

[mkygod]

it doesnt noticeably lag when im just reading webpages or doing normal things. But when im watching a divx or xvid on fullscreen it would sometimes skip when i scroll up and down the webpages. Even though the vid only reaches 20-30% cpu usage on fullscreen, scrolling through webpages at the same time was enough to make my cpu spike up to a total of around 60-70% according to task manger.

I think at very short moments, it peaks 100% and thats when the video skips, its just that the task manager doesnt see it because it only polls once per second.

 

[kobymu]

liked i said, some web site are not coded very well, and 20% cpu usage is quite normal.
and you'r welcome

 

[MobiusPizza]

They are some other reasons such as Windows' smooth scrolling feature, the ClearType text rendering, etc which of all uses CPU. Go to System->Advance->Performance setting in control panel to take a look. Most features there can be disabled. They are a total waste of processing power

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: mkygod
it doesnt noticeably lag when im just reading webpages or doing normal things. But when im watching a divx or xvid on fullscreen it would sometimes skip when i scroll up and down the webpages. Even though the vid only reaches 20-30% cpu usage on fullscreen, scrolling through webpages at the same time was enough to make my cpu spike up to a total of around 60-70% according to task manger.

I think at very short moments, it peaks 100% and thats when the video skips, its just that the task manager doesnt see it because it only polls once per second.

do you have anough memory for both apps to run completely from memory?

 

[mkygod]

Id like a few more opinions and have some of you post up your cpu usage.

20% still seems kindve high to me. Mind you that i get sometimes get 20% on pages that have no java or flash.

It doesn't really matter how a webpage is coded. The part that should eat up cpu usage is when the page loads up. But once the webpage, with all its scripts and components are loaded up, cpu should be very little when you are just scrolling up and down, since the page is in your cache with nothing else to load.

Ive tried many sites anandtech forums, hardocp, techreport, msn, even my own crappy website which is just basic html, and i get high cpu usage each time.

 

[mkygod]

Originally posted by: AnnihilatorX
They are some other reasons such as Windows' smooth scrolling feature, the ClearType text rendering, etc which of all uses CPU. Go to System->Advance->Performance setting in control panel to take a look. Most features there can be disabled. They are a total waste of processing power

I already had the setting at Adjust for best performance, which basically turns all of those settings off. Thanks for the suggestion though.

 

[mkygod]

Originally posted by: kobymu
do you have anough memory for both apps to run completely from memory?

Yes, according to task manager i still had 700mb free of physical memory and plenty of space left on my swap drive for virtual memory

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: mkygod

Originally posted by: kobymu
do you have anough memory for both apps to run completely from memory?

Yes, according to task manager i still had 700mb free of physical memory and plenty of space left on my swap drive for virtual memory

is the movie player open or minimaized?
is the movie player set to be always on top when you scroll the web?

and one more thing, does the the movie player skip a frame only in the first time you switch to ie/ff or every time (or most of the time) you switch apps?

 

[mkygod]

The player was open on full screen, on my secondary display while i was browsing webpages on my primary display. The player was not set to always on top. It skips when i am scrolling a web page, with only 1 ie window open. Its not caused by switching applications.

Please note that the high cpu consumption also happens when im not playing video or doing anything cpu intensive. I just mentioned the video part because thats how i ran across the problem, when i noticed the video skip as i was reading webpages. So the video is NOT directly related to the scrolling problem.

To be absolutely clear, I am not concerned with the video cpu consumption, the problem is ONLY with the webpage scrolling cpu consumption.

 

[FishTankX]

Turn off smooth scrolling in the advanced options

 

[kobymu]

have you tried saving the wab page in you'r hdd (web archive, xxx.mht) and browsing the page localy?

sorry for asking the dumb questions, just wanted to be sure

 

[MobiusPizza]

Since scrolling the webpage involves RAM bufferring, the only reason I can think of is somehow your CPU doesn't like your RAM; Or it might be a virus.

Is this reproducable in all websites?
Try it with loading plain text sites

Try disabling java/javascript; there might be bug in them that sucks up CPU

 

[dunkster]

I just looked at iexplore.exe in Task Manager while fast-scrolling the main page at Hardocp.

I saw momentary spikes in CPU usage of up to 40%. These appeared to be truly 'spikes' of about 1 second duration.

I have no reason to believe I have problems with my IE installation and I'm quite certain my system is 'clean' of spyware and trojans. I'm not concerned at all. I wouldn't worry about it.

Hope this helps!