downloading causes high cpu usage

[sneeze]

Hey all, I need help..newly installed windows 7 yesterday and everything is fine until I started to use utorrent for torrenting or just downloading in general. My cpu usage would go to 30%-60% when downloading and causes the computer to be very choppy and I can't do anything but wait for the download to be done and then will the resources goes down to normal level. Anyone having the same problem? Any advices or quick fix for this? Thanks all

 

[chev65]

It sound more like Utorrent is hogging all your internet bandwidth. Try right clicking the Utorrent icon "lower right" and then limit either the download or the upload speeds and see if that inproves the situation.

 

[Jake90087]

No I don't have that problem, and can you update your system specs please?

 

[sneeze]

forgot to mention I upgraded from Windows XP and never had this problem when downloading on XP.

here are my specs

OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
Version 6.1.7600 Build 7600
System Manufacturer MSI
System Model MS-7325
System Type X86-based PC
Processor AMD Athlon(tm) 64 FX-62 Dual Core Processor, 2814 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. V1.00, 11/8/2006
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Windows Directory C:\Windows
System Directory C:\Windows\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 3.25 GB
Available Physical Memory 2.39 GB
Total Virtual Memory 6.50 GB
Available Virtual Memory 5.57 GB
Page File Space 3.25 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

 

[Jake90087]

okay so your comp can defo handle downloading things but this is mysterious! I'm not too sure but will look into it meanwhile and i'll post anything I find

 

[Jake90087]

btw what av are you using and are you using the latest release and all other stuff's being up to date?

 

[sneeze]

Here's a before and after pic

Yes Jake, windows 7 is updated to the lastest and i turned off all windows security stuff. ATM i am using Malwarebytes as my av. Everything worked fine before when I was on Windows XP. Thanks for the responses

 

[Jake90087]

okay! what I did notice is that (for me) 1.5 MB/s Is incredibly quick but I really can't get this one it's very strange!:huh:

 

[sneeze]

hmm, now that I think about it..my network card probably didn't get updated. I'll check to see if I can find anything.

 

[Jake90087]

Do it and let's hope it works!

 

[Aussie69]

Did you end up finding a fix for this? I have exactly the same issue. It started a few years ago when I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7.

With Win XP max download rates I was getting was around 500-600kb/s and it had no ill effect on the running of the computer, I could happily leave utorrent running in the background and get on with other things, now with Win7, I'm still getting max download rates of 500-600kb/s but once the rate gets above around 400kb/s the computer begins to stutter and becomes pretty much unusable.

CPU usage seems to get quite high when download rates are right up there and the computer is stuttering.

I've come across a few threads about this issue but no thread ever seems to have a conclusion, fix or result, they just stop abruptly. It's really starting to annoy me...lol.

 

[Aussie69]

For anyone who comes across this, I've managed to fix my issue

I noticed that along with high CPU usage the system interrupts was high as well. Something I read got me thinking about my DSL modem and if the issue laid with it. What I did was disconnect my DSL modem and plugged my laptops wireless internet usb stick into the computer and used that and compare results. I found my computer ran smoothly even with high download rates. I plugged my DSL modem back in and it ran crap again. I thought this was unusal. Thinking that maybe the fact for each modem I was using a different USB port may have been the differing factor I plugged my DSL modem into the same USB port on the front of my computer that I had my wires USB modem plugged into and fair enough everything ran smoothly. So the issue resided with the particular port my DSL modem was plugged into. Can't believe I have been chasing this fault on and off for almost two years and the fix was literally a 10 second job.

PS. As a bonus my peak download speeds seem to have increased too . I'm hitting almost 700kb/s even as I type this and everything is smooth/fast as. I'm so freaken happy...lol.

 

[Diosoth]

I only get CPU spikes when uTorrent first starts up and loads up active torrents, but I've noticed if I leave it on overnight, my consumed RAM increases a bit and after a few days I've lost about 200-300 MB of RAM within the svchosts and such thanks to this. I wouldn't imaging writing to the HDD would do that but then again, W7 is a bit poorly designed in my eyes. Dropping use of thumbs.db in favor of the current method of handling thumbnails for images and video, for example, eats up CPU and RAM especially if you have several image folders open.

 

[Aussie69]

Some more info on what I discovered:-

When I was experiencing issues (high CPU usage, high DPC/Interrupts) my DSL modem was plugged into a dedicated USB3.0/2.0 port, however when I removed it and plugged it into a USB2.0/1.1 port everything worked fine, CPU usage was super low, DPC/Interrupts were low and my peak download rate increased.

As every USB port on the back of my PC is in use my permanent fix was to simply swap my wireless keyboard/mouse dongle into the USB3.0 port and the DSL modem into the USB2.0 port, and now it's happy days.

I really hope my discovery helps someone else out, or someone with more smarts then me can figure out why plugging my DSL modem into a USB3.0/2.0 port would cause issues like that (Modem is a D-Link DSL 526B). It's one of those bug hunt kind of problems, everything presents itself as normal until your download rate reaches a certain limit, so when I built this new machine and put everything together a few years ago everything appeared to go smooth and to plan. I did notice the stuttering issue when download rates were high almost straight away but never even thought for a minute the port I choose to plug the modem into would have been the issue.