BSOD running Plex Media Server, now NIC not working and locking up

doveman007 · 11 Jul 2013

spvve.sys is definitely part of SoftPerfect as it's in it's folder, as is spvdbus.sys, so I think your decision was good :)

Seems to be running fine at the moment, with no crashes running HwInfo or Plex, so it's better than it ever was thanks :)

I am still having an issue with latency, as shown by LatencyMon, with it hitting 3000us+ within 30s (just hit 7210us after 1.5mins). It doesn't really give me a clue what is triggering it though. Perhaps it will improve after I install the AMD chipset and other drivers.

Arc · 11 Jul 2013

OK, try the other drivers one by one, but dont install anything from the motherboard disc other than chipset :)

doveman007 · 11 Jul 2013

Arc said:

OK, try the other drivers one by one, but dont install anything from the motherboard disc other than chipset :)

Heh, I don't even know where the motherboard disc is anymore and always download the latest available drivers

I've installed the 13.4 AMD Chipset driver and upgraded the Realtek Audio to 6923 now. I'm still seeing the same problems with latency, which seems to be connected to HDD activity as it stays around 80-300us, with the occasional spike to 500us whilst idle but when I launch Iron, which has several tabs open, it spikes to 3000us+. Launching Plex and scanning the media folders and it hit around 4000us+. Launching IE, which only has one tab open and it hit 1700us.

If I switch to High Performance mode, which disables Cool'n'Quiet and Link State Power Management, I don't seem to get any spikes launching IE or running Plex but still do when launching Iron (and after that just with it open).

As I say, it's hard to tell from LatencyMon what's causing the spikes but storport.sys often appears for highest ISR and DPC (51us ISR, 607us DPC). This appears to have been installed by the AMD Chipset drivers as before I only saw ataport.sys mentioned (on my other system with the Chipset drivers installed, I do see storport.sys mentioned as well). Googling this driver suggests it's used for SCSI devices but that seems not to be completely true.

Under the drivers tab in LatencyMon, the top listed drivers for Highest Execution time are currently

ntoskrnl.exe 0.124
storport.sys 0.121
USBPORT.SYS 0.09
ndis.sys 0.078
dxgkrnl.sys 0.070
netbt.sys 0.063
tcpip.sys 0.061

everything else is 0.036 or lower.

As the top two seem unrelated to USB or NIC, it seems unlikely that upgrading those drivers will help much but I'll give that a go next. I guess I could try connecting the HDD to the SATA3 port and see if that helps

doveman007 · 11 Jul 2013

Hmm, seems there's still some issues.

I updated the USB, NIC and SATA3 drivers, then connected the HDD to the SATA3 port to see if that would fix the latency problems. It didn't but that's not the issue. I ran HwInfo64 after using the system for a while and like before, the screen went off and I had to hard reset. When it rebooted, the Sidebar gadgets failed to appear and the mouse icon was stuck on busy and I couldn't do anything so had to hard reset again. I reconnected the HDD to the SATA2 port (and removed one of the PCI cards which was in the way) and I've booted OK again now and tested HwInfo and it's OK as well but it's worrying that this happened again.

doveman007 · 11 Jul 2013

I'm trying to disable the pagefile as I see a lot of Hard Page Faults in LatencyMon, which seem to coincide with the latency spikes, so I thought if I could prevent it using the pagefile it might fix the latency problem.

However, Windows won't let me and when it reboot says

"Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer because of a problem that occurred with your paging file configuration when you started your computer"

and it creates a 8GB pagefile on C: (I previously had it on D:). Going into the Virtual Memory settings, it shows that No Paging File is set for C: and D: but if I click Set on C:, it registers a change and makes me reboot, so obviously that screen is out of sync with the actual situation.

I have no problem disabling the pagefile on my other system, with 16GB. Does Windows not allow this when there's only 8GB?

Arc · 12 Jul 2013

I am not very faqmiliar with the programs you are talking about. I can do with the BSODs, what I have done. Requested our other members to have a look at your issue.

bobafetthotmail · 12 Jul 2013

Summon successful!

This article explains how to use latencymon to troubleshoot stuff.
This is the relevant part in your case:

Next, click the "Processes" tab, then click the "Hard page faults" column header so that the largest numbers appear at the top. Hard page faults occur when a program needs data that isn't resident in physical RAM, and so Windows has to read it in from the paging file, instead. This is a time-consuming business, and so if a process is generating a lot of hard page faults during audio playback then it might result in dropouts.

So, the culprit is a process, a program. What is the name (or names) you see?

Please don't disable pagefile as it's needed for collecting bluescreen dumps and other system stuff. But since you have 8 gigs of ram and thus it's not going to be needed for its main role (virtual memory) you can safely reduce it to 1024 MB in C: only (set it manually as both minimum and maximum size and hit "set", not hitting "set" when you change stuff in that panel won't apply changes).

doveman007 · 12 Jul 2013

Thanks for the referral Arc and for helping me sort out the BSOD issues.

bobafetthotmail, I actually disabled the pagefile on my other system, with 16GB, and still saw hard pagefaults, which seems a bit weird but anyway, let's not worry about that for now.

I appreciate it's needed for the dumps, etc but I'm still a bit concerned that it won't let me disable it on this system, as I'm almost certain I've been able to in the past with systems with only 8GB. Anyway, we can look into that later perhaps.

LatencyMon shows that the process with the highest number of pagefaults is svchost at 190 (and rising) after about a minute. This isn't associated with high latency though, which is hovering below 75us with the odd spike to 200us and the highest around 400us. The latency seems to be triggered by HDD activity and the person who's analysed the traces for me tells me

"and you still have disk issues. Your HDD is flushing the data all the time (open the etl with xperfview.exe, make a rightclick on the disk graph and select "Detail graph", here you see a lot of red lines). The depth queue is better but still 30 which is still bad. "

by better I think he's referring to my other system, which showed a depth queue of 149 but I was launching Iron with a lot more tabs open and I'm currently running in High Performance mode, not Balanced, which might be helping as well.

I noticed that HwInfoMonitor (a sidebar gadget) was showing about 10 pagefaults, so closed that and restarted LatencyMon and now it only shows a count of 3 pagefaults after 3 minutes, one on svchost.exe and one on explorer.exe. I'm not sure where the third one is hiding! If I launch Iron, I get a latency spike of 12325us (and several below 1000us) and the pagefault count rises to 240 by the time all the tabs have loaded, but processes only shows 50 on Iron.exe, 3 on another instance of Iron.exe, 8 on TrustedInstaller.exe, 2 on svchost.exe, 1 on explorer.exe and 1 on another instance of iron.exe. The total count and the first instance of iron.exe are slowing rising, now on 264 and 66 respectively. Iron seems to open an instance of iron.exe for each tab, judging by Task Manager, so I'm not sure if this indicates that most of the pagefaults are associated with one particular tab.

Regarding the lockup I had after HwInfo crashed the system, although HwInfo wasn't running after rebooting I did have the Persistent Driver enabled, so I suppose that might have still been scanning and causing problems. I've disabled that now to eliminate it. Whilst this time the HwInfo induced crash and subsequent desktop lockup on reboot occurred whilst I had the HDD connected to the SATA3 port, both happened previously with it connected to the AMD SATA2 port. It's possible that the persistent driver was still scanning the SATA3 controller and that was causing problems, even with nothing connected to it, though. I'm waiting to hear from the HwInfo authors what they think about this.

Let me know if you'd like to look at the etl traces for yourself and I'll provide links to them.

EDIT: I closed Iron and re-enabled HwInfoMonitor and although it's still showing some pagefaults on that (6 after 1.5mins) I'm not seeing any of svchost.exe now.

gregrocker · 12 Jul 2013

I've never seen anything here since before Win7 was released about Comodo that wasn't a problem. Uninstalling it often solves them.

What kind of rules are you trying to add to firewall that Win7's perfectly balanced firewall cannot handle?

Avast and Avira are fine, but not that much better from what we've seen than MSE which offers the best performance and least bother. For chronically infected I recommend Malwarebytes Real-Time protection (30 day free trial, then $29 for life) which has always solved the problem.

doveman007 · 12 Jul 2013

gregrocker said:

I've never seen anything here since before Win7 was released about Comodo that wasn't a problem. Uninstalling it often solves them.

What kind of rules are you trying to add to firewall that Win7's perfectly balanced firewall cannot handle?

Avast and Avira are fine, but not that much better from what we've seen than MSE which offers the best performance and least bother. For chronically infected I recommend Malwarebytes Real-Time protection (30 day free trial, then $29 for life) which has always solved the problem.

I've uninstalled Comodo for now anyway, so that can't be causing any of my current problems.

I seem to recall that Windows firewall didn't produce popups to alert to outgoing connections, which is vital as far as I'm concerned. I believe Tiny Firewall helps with that, so I might give it another go although I recall I preferred Comodo from last time I tested.

I'll certainly look at MSE once I've sorted out the current problems. I'm not sure if it allows to exclude folders as other AVs do, which I find useful to avoid wasting resources and slowdowns when running games, accessing media files, etc.