PC Stuttering mouse/audio/video lag

Hello remuze,

This may be a shot in the dark, but can you try downloading the program in the link below and posting a screenshot of it running after about a few minutes or so in your next reply:-

DPC Latency Checker

http://www.thesycon.de/dpclat/dpclat.exe

How to take a screenshot:-

How to Use the Snipping Tool in Vista - Vista Forums

How to upload the screenshot:-

Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

Thanks for your cooperation.

remuze said:

Thanks for your quick reply! Obviously something is misbehaving, which is strange as I haven't installed anything new recently so it could have been an automatic windows update or something? The program said to try turning things on and off so I might give that a pop? Bonus points to you for shot in the dark :)

Hold on a tick remuze, I've got an incoming post with everything you need to do next... your patience is appreciated...

Hmm.. that is one disturbing looking graph full of red spikes!

A normal, healthy system would only ever have green spikes...

It's time for us to get up close and personal with what the exact problem might be using this nifty tool from Microsoft called the Windows Performance Toolkit:-

Attachment 221644 Attachment 221645 Attachment 221646

Download the attachments, unrar them using WinRAR/7zip/or your preferred file extractor, and run the installer.

When done, please prepare your system for the diagnosis by Disabling Paging Executive (needed for xperf to run with the stackwalk profile)

DisablePagingExecutive.reg

Double click the downloaded .reg file and click yes to allow it change that entry in your registry.





Next, open a command prompt with admin rights (type in cmd at your search bar, right click on cmd.exe and run as administrator)





Go to C:\temp (cd\temp) (make the folder if you do not have it) and run the following commands:

Code:

xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile 

(I use a different folder for mine but it doesn't matter where you run it from)



Now wait for some time (2 - 3 minutes) while the high DPC and Interrupt usage occurs.

To stop the trace run the following command:

Code:

xperf -d DPC_Interrupt.etl 

This closes the trace and writes the result to the file DPC_Interrupt.etl.

In the next step, make a double click the etl file (which would be in the C:\temp folder) to run the Viewer.

Now wait until the 2 passes are over.

Here's what the graphs looks like for example on my system (scroll down to see DPC CPU Utilization and Interrupt CPU Utilization)





Go to "Trace"(in the menu bar at the top) ->"Configure Symbol Paths" and type in the following:

Code:

srv*C:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols 

Click OK, to close the dialog.





Now go to the graphs "DPC CPU Usage" or "Interrupt CPU Usage" (depending where your high CPU usage occurs) and select the interval, make a right click and select "Load Symbols" and next, click summary table.

Now, you will have to accept the license agreement to download the public debugging symbols.

(The PDBs can be massive, and it may take a while to download depending on your Internet connection)

Here you'll see summary of the calls..

Convert the etl files to uploadable txt files by using this command from the same location (C:\temp) where the DPC_Interrupt.etl file is stored.

Run it, and upload the txt file in your next reply please...

Code:

xperf -I DPC_Interrupt.etl -a dpcisr > dpc.txt

Thanks for your patience!

The regedit file should be fine, it was built for 64bit registrys.. You were meant to import the file by double clicking on it to allow the entries to be added to the registry.

Hmm that's a very interesting error, which means that there's too many DPC Interrupts happening on your system that even the logging program could not deal with it, or you don't have enough space/RAM for the logger/tracer to cope with the amount of data.

How much free space do you have on C:?

Do you have another hard disk that's empty to run the commands on again?
(D: ?)

You could try to run the 1st xperf command again on C:\temp

xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile

but for a much shorter time (10-15 seconds), and then quickly type in the second xperf command

xperf -d DPC_Interrupt.etl

to stop the trace after that period of time...

If you want to be sure that the entry from that DisablePagingExecutive registry file applied properly to your Registry head to the registry itself and check the entry as shown in this following screenshot:-

Thanks for replying, and it's great to know some thing has been caught this time :)

Did you check out my follow up post regarding the registry entry?