[RESOLVED] windows 8.1 cpu usage at idle - 15-25%

[MrDudeMan]

Edit 2: It started happening again. There were no log file entries and absolutely nothing was running other than processes I couldn't kill. I gave up and installed Windows 7. Going back to Windows 8 was an option, but I simply don't have time to mess with this anymore and I never had any issues in Windows 7. /sigh

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Solution

Check the event viewer in the system section to see if you're getting a lot of errors. If so, this may be your issue as well.

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I've been searching for over an hour and I can't find any solutions to this. The main reason I want this fixed (other than the fact that it's a stupid problem) is because the CPU fan runs incessantly now that the CPU usage is so high. I literally had nothing open other than task manager and a single windows explorer window when I took this screen shot. Here are my basic system specs. Not shown is an Intel 530 series SSD, but that's basically it.

No apps were running - metro or otherwise.
Nothing in the tray other than the basics.

Over 10% in random bullshit. WTF?

 

[JEDIYoda]

I really find that highly suspect......because on all 3 of the machines that are running 8.1 they are all 1 or 2% at idle......

I have no clue and would be guessing but go into task manager and see if anything else is running in the background.......

I didn`t mean highly suspect in that your dissing 8.1....I meant that from a purely that doesn`t sound correct....

Peace!!

 

[MrDudeMan]

I really find that highly suspect......because on all 3 of the machines that are running 8.1 they are all 1 or 2% at idle......

I have no clue and would be guessing but go into task manager and see if anything else is running in the background.......

I didn`t mean highly suspect in that your dissing 8.1....I meant that from a purely that doesn`t sound correct....

Peace!!

I've restarted, shutdown, put it to sleep, killed literally every process that it will allow me to kill, and nothing changes. Immediately after a fresh reboot, it's at 1-2%, but then it goes to 15-25% within a few minutes and I literally don't do anything except open task manager. I've turned off every service that won't break the computer. I've seen many, many similar threads all over the internet, but no one has a solution.

 

[JEDIYoda]

so perhaps my results are an anomaly....

 

[Mem]

I've been searching for over an hour and I can't find any solutions to this. The main reason I want this fixed (other than the fact that it's a stupid problem) is because the CPU fan runs incessantly now that the CPU usage is so high. I literally had nothing open other than task manager and a single windows explorer window when I took this screen shot. Here are my basic system specs. Not shown is an Intel 530 series SSD, but that's basically it.

No apps were running - metro or otherwise.
Nothing in the tray other than the basics.

Over 10% in random bullshit. WTF?

Mine is at 1% idle,as to the cause I guess you can check you have latest drivers including chipset ones for Win8.1,rule out any malware or virus too,having too many programs on startup also does not help.

Btw are you using Decor8?

Reason I ask is there is a new version out that fixes high cpu usage.

The Decor8 v1.07 update is now available for customers and Object Desktop subscribers.
This update includes:

• Fix for report of start menu colors reverting to black
• Fix for random option sometimes making Explorer windows jump to top
• Fix for reports of high cpu usage on 8.1

 

[Super56K]

Could it be tied to network utilization? Have you disabled/unplugged ethernet to see if usage drops? Same baseline usage in safe mode?

 

[glugglug]

Is it a brand new install?

If so, it could be the background compilation of .NET 4.0 assemblies. The assemblies that install initially are all bytecode, there is a background process that makes cached versions converted to be optimized for your specific processor, so a new install will have high CPU for awhile until that and the indexer complete.

If this is it, you should see the process using the CPU as "mscorsvw.exe". See here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2013/08/06/wondering-why-mscorsvw-exe-has-high-cpu-usage-you-can-speed-it-up.aspx

 

[postmark]

In task manager what is showing it's using the CPU? If you go to the Details tab and sort by CPU you can see what's using the most.

 

[jkauff]

Anything that's running as a service in the background could be causing your problem. I stopped using real-time update in HWInfo64, and my idle CPU usage went from 15% to 2%. Anything that's monitoring your system states, updating the weather, checking for software updates constantly (like Apple Update does on Windows), checking Facebook or Twitter--these all use CPU cycles. You may not be using any of the Metro apps knowingly, but some of them run by default after you install the OS.

I agree with the person who suggested you use the new Task Manager or Sysinternal's Process Monitor to see which services or programs are causing the problem.

 

[Zargon]

if 25% load makes the fan spin up....clean it!!!

 

[Berryracer]

My task manager, clean Windows 8.1 Install with NOD32 and the latest drivers:

 

[MrDudeMan]

if 25% load makes the fan spin up....clean it!!!

The computer isn't in a case. I don't know why, but I prefer for it to simply sit on a shelf... lol. Spinning up slightly while not in the case is fairly annoying, but it never used to do this. I cleaned it last night thinking that may help; unfortunately, it didn't.

I'll check the task manager when I get home, but I didn't post a picture of that because nothing noteworthy was listed. It seems to simply be background processes for the OS instead of anything I'm running. Like I said, I've literally killed everything it will let me kill and the CPU usage won't go down.

To answer earlier questions:
1) No change when the network connections are disabled
2) The install isn't new, but the Windows 8.1 update is. I don't know if it's related, but it seems awfully coincidental if it's not.

Ugh...

 

[MrDudeMan]

 

[MrDudeMan]

 

[glugglug]

One thing I would point out, is for so many tiny idle processes to be using measurable amounts, I'm betting you are not using the "high performance" power profile. With most power profiles, Windows will lower your CPU clock speed as much as possible, and then do a duty cycle throttling thing where it runs for 2 microseconds, halts for 2 microseconds, etc, halting as much as possible as long as no core gets pegged. Until you get to 12.5% (one logical core pegged), 1% isn't anywhere close to 1% of what the CPU could really do. We've seen on Dell servers that don't let you disable this feature (regardless of Windows settings) that the CPU clock speed doesn't increase from the minimum until the OS things you are hitting 80% overall usage (so 6 out of 8 logical cores pegged!).

But if that is the case, the fan spinning up is really puzzling. Are you using the stock Intel heatsink? If so, that could be the issue -- those things are a complete joke, especially the pogo-pin retention mechanism. I guess because the stock heatsinks are defective by design since the core 2, they had to improve the thermal throttling to where you can actually remove the HSF entirely and be OK, especially if you are running it without the case. Try jiggling the heatsink to make sure it is secure. If it isn't making good contact with the CPU that could explain it.

Edit: Just realized your last screenshot gives it away (sort of):

In the screenshot, it shows
Context Switch Delta: 397,005
Interrupt Delta: 434,274

Is this with 1 second update interval?

On the Windows 7 machine I am using right now, which is recording 5 HDTV channels simultaneously and analyzing them to mark commercials for auto-skipping, has 3 logged in users, and is streaming to 2 XBOXes while I am web browsing, I have ~17K interrupts/sec and ~26K context switches/sec in perfmon. If anything, the timer coalescing feature of Windows 8 should make it have less interrupts and context switches than 7.

This tells me you have some device generating an excessive amount of interrupts. Video card set for > 240Hz refresh with some kind of horizontal retrace interrupt to do something funky with 3D glasses? Maybe a broken USB device? Doing USB3 disk transfers without xHCI? SSD being scanned in IDE mode? For a ping flood to generate that number of interrupts, the source would probably need to be on your LAN, not over a cable modem connection. I think it might also be possible to accidentally generate a flood of network interrupts if your router is plugged into itself. Definitely does on the router (usually crashing it), not so sure on whether the right trigger packets for that will generate the same effect on the PC.

 

[MrDudeMan]

One thing I would point out, is for so many tiny idle processes to be using measurable amounts, I'm betting you are not using the "high performance" power profile. With most power profiles, Windows will lower your CPU clock speed as much as possible, and then do a duty cycle throttling thing where it runs for 2 microseconds, halts for 2 microseconds, etc, halting as much as possible as long as no core gets pegged. Until you get to 12.5% (one logical core pegged), 1% isn't anywhere close to 1% of what the CPU could really do. We've seen on Dell servers that don't let you disable this feature (regardless of Windows settings) that the CPU clock speed doesn't increase from the minimum until the OS things you are hitting 80% overall usage (so 6 out of 8 logical cores pegged!).

But if that is the case, the fan spinning up is really puzzling. Are you using the stock Intel heatsink? If so, that could be the issue -- those things are a complete joke, especially the pogo-pin retention mechanism. I guess because the stock heatsinks are defective by design since the core 2, they had to improve the thermal throttling to where you can actually remove the HSF entirely and be OK, especially if you are running it without the case. Try jiggling the heatsink to make sure it is secure. If it isn't making good contact with the CPU that could explain it.

Edit: Just realized your last screenshot gives it away (sort of):

In the screenshot, it shows
Context Switch Delta: 397,005
Interrupt Delta: 434,274

Is this with 1 second update interval?

On the Windows 7 machine I am using right now, which is recording 5 HDTV channels simultaneously and analyzing them to mark commercials for auto-skipping, has 3 logged in users, and is streaming to 2 XBOXes while I am web browsing, I have ~17K interrupts/sec and ~26K context switches/sec in perfmon. If anything, the timer coalescing feature of Windows 8 should make it have less interrupts and context switches than 7.

This tells me you have some device generating an excessive amount of interrupts. Video card set for > 240Hz refresh with some kind of horizontal retrace interrupt to do something funky with 3D glasses? Maybe a broken USB device? Doing USB3 disk transfers without xHCI? SSD being scanned in IDE mode? For a ping flood to generate that number of interrupts, the source would probably need to be on your LAN, not over a cable modem connection. I think it might also be possible to accidentally generate a flood of network interrupts if your router is plugged into itself. Definitely does on the router (usually crashing it), not so sure on whether the right trigger packets for that will generate the same effect on the PC.

I wish I had seen your interrupt [edit: lol, I meant update. Too much embedded C programming...] before I spent two hours debugging. You keyed in on the problem exactly. I still don't know how to solve it, but there are a shitload of errors being generated every second by something.

I tried following the advice of several forums to edit the registry key associated with the CLSID shown in the picture, but it said I wasn't allowed to do that.

BTW: The performance stuff is set correctly. I do a lot of very CPU intensive work, so I have to have it running at top speed. The HSF isn't the issue even though it's stock. This is new behavior and no hardware has changed. It has to be related to the error log as you inferred with your bold statements.

 

[MrDudeMan]

OK, new symptom. As shown in the image above, there are shitloads of errors being generated. However, they aren't being generated immediately after restarting.

Also, so the numbers are easier to copy and paste in case anyone wants to help debug, here is the error:

The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{C2F03A33-21F5-47FA-B4BB-156362A2F239}
and APPID
{316CDED5-E4AE-4B15-9113-7055D84DCC97}
to the user NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE SID (S-1-5-19) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC) running in the application container Unavailable SID (Unavailable). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

I'm sure this isn't entirely related to Excel, but I opened Excel and the errors started up again. My guess is many other programs would have triggered it as well, though.

 

[glugglug]

Searching for that CLSID and APPID on line, it appears to be a problem with Bing Weather when upgraded from 8 to 8.1... but people are saying it doesn't let you uninstall metro apps like that?

Supposedly this is the fix: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-winapps/weather-application/e4630db3-50c2-4cc5-9813-f089494a1145

 

[MrDudeMan]

Searching for that CLSID and APPID on line, it appears to be a problem with Bing Weather when upgraded from 8 to 8.1... but people are saying it doesn't let you uninstall metro apps like that?

Supposedly this is the fix: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-winapps/weather-application/e4630db3-50c2-4cc5-9813-f089494a1145

Thanks. The problem is fixed after following those steps and then rebooting. I actually found that earlier, but it didn't seem to work. However, I tried it again and the errors have ceased. Phew! My computer is quiet again!

I wonder how many SSD write cycles were wasted on that damn error. I've been using the computer for three weeks for many hours per day and it was generating hundreds of thousands of errors per minute. /sigh

Thank you everyone who helped me debug this.

 

[JEDIYoda]

I am glad you have that fixed!!

 

[MrDudeMan]

Update: I went back to Windows 7 after it started happening again. This time, however, there were no log file entries. I spent about 10 minutes working on it until I decided to shrink the partition, install Windows 7, and migrate everything. Oh well.