CPU every night 100%

Hello,

i have a Windows 7 Professional machine witch runns (mostly) 24/7, for running an application. It is running in an vmware enviroment whith other machines that experience no problem whatsoever.

Recently i noticed some "errors" that orruced daily between 2:00 AM - 5:00 AM
I did setup a system monitoring and found out, that the CPU usage is daily at 100% between 2:30AM - 3:00AM and between 4:00AM - 5:00AM.

I made a few tries to stop that, but it has'nt changed anything.

- disabled Windows Update
- disabled scheduled Tasks that started around this times (Application Experience, Cusomer Experience)

Sinze i found no monitoring solution that can log process + cpu usage over time, i used the installed cygwin enviroment and wrote a little script yesturay. It uses "pslist" to get process + cpu usage every 5 minutes.
Unfortunately the log has half to full hour gaps at the times when the other monitoring logged 100% CPU usage.

If i try to connect with VNC or RDP at the time the system goes to 100% CPU, it soes'nt work well (black screen, no connection, unbearable slow,...).



Any suggestions? A reliable monitoring solution that loggs processes whith their cpu usage would help.
I tryed resmon, but only get total cpu usage, not releated to any process. I tryed process monitor with it's logging feature, but this eats up all memory if it runs for more than 5 minutes. Thats rly frustrating...

-update-

I maybe found the problem. Not 100% sure, but close. Another VM had regulary high CPU usage at the time when the problem occures. Somehow the Windows VM shows me the host CPU usage, not the usage for itself.

Something has gone terribly wrong if a VM is showing host CPU usage. Seriously, it shouldn't even be possible. Seems more likely it's lack of resources. Have you overprovisioned cores or RAM? If I'm not mistaken, it could even be a storage issue: CPU can show high usage while simply waiting for disk I/O.