Hardware Interrupts causing 25% - 30% CPU usage

[sparked]

Hello! Sorry for my English!
I have similar problem: Process Explorer shows Interrupts (Hardware Interrupts) causing 20-35% CPU usage. But I can't find source of my problem, because it doesn't always happens. Sometimes the problem does not appear at all, but when starts, it will not stop until hybrid sleep or restart.
I don't know how to identify problematic hardware, because problem can start unexpectedly, without any specific reasons.

Today it startеd again. I tried to disable some hardware (e.g. Network adapter, IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers) but takes no effect.

Need your help! Thanks in advance.

When you run process explorer do you see the CPU spending time in DPCs and Interrupts and the CPU having a steady ~30% usage ?

It could be your iPhone or some other USB device. I discovered yesterday that my iPhone was triggering this. The system is at near 0% CPU when idle but after I connect my iphone it jumps to 30% and stays there (doin somethin with DPCs and Interrupts) long after the iphone is gone. But after a reboot or a sleep, the system goes back to normal ~0% idle cpu usage.

I believe MSFT has posted some patch/fix for similar problems with USB drives but I am too scared to try it out.

 

[sahiljuneja]

hello guys.. i finally came out of the solution..here is wat i did...
i have two hard drives
i opened my cabinet n found out a harddrive was connected to the motherboard and no power was given to it so i removed the connection between the hard drive and the motherboard.in other words i took the unused harddrive out of the cabinet thus totally disconnecting it......

so according to me it could be that a hardware is attacthed to the system but is not getting power supply...... so pplease open ur cabinet n check whether all connections are put in right placed or if there is ny unit like graphic card or harddrive which is not getting the power supply from the psu thought it might be connected to the motherboard.....thus interrupts come when a unit is attacthed to the motherboard but is not getting any power supply

 

[whs]

Thanks for reporting back. That is a pretty unusual situation but good to remember for the next case with a lot of DPCs.

 

[dvizard]

Hi,

I have the same or a related problem on a Toshiba Portege R700-16R.

• Often after waking up from hibernation, System Interrupts take 25-30% CPU, which is caused by ACPI.sys as seen with Xperf. The problem persists until I reboot. Going back to sleep and waking up again helps sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.
• In addition, going to sleep mode works only about 90% of the times; sometimes the computer gets stuck in the process with a black screen. I then have to force-turn it off with 4 sec power button.
• I have experienced, in a few cases, the computer waking up on its own a few minutes after going to sleep mode.
• I have the impression that USB is involved in the problem, or at least affected by the problem, since the system sometimes has problems recognizing USB devices when the System Interrupts problem occurs. Interestingly, the problem happens with 3 totally unrelated USB "setups":

• At home, I have a super-cheap USB wireless keyboard/mouse set by Typhoon (which causes problems most frequently, and as a side note, always has to be re-plugged in after waking up from sleep mode or it won't work.)
• At work, I have a wired USB keyboard and a wired USB mouse (1 USB port each).
• At my parents' home, I have a good-quality wireless USB keyboard/mouse set by Fujitsu-Siemens.
• Other USB devices (drives, USB sticks etc.) are attached only occasionally.

• So while my Typhoon USB wireless desktop is obviously of low quality, I don't think the problem is actually caused by it, because the System Interrupts problem and also the Sleep mode stuck problem occur also when only the wired USB keyboard and mouse or the F-S wireless desktop are attached. To me, it seems like the USB port doesn't handle all events correctly and might have more problems with low-quality devices which are maybe not 100% standard-conforming.
• Of course, it's possible that USB is perfectly fine and only affected by underlying problems of some other driver.

Any hints on what to do next?

 

[SteelWillHeal]

On Board LAN Card

Hi,

I've had the same problem with ACPI.sys using as much as 60% on one core of my CPU. .....

and voila: "Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller" was shown.........


Next I disabled the option in Power Management for the device: "Allow this device to wake the computer"
Immediately the CPU usage went to normal (without restarting).


I'm using the latest NIC drivers.

~

My MOB has a onboard Realtelk LAN card. After a long period of normal use some how the "Allow this device to wake the computer" option became checked (ok, maybe I did it, but I don't remember it.) One of the CPUs ran persistently at 60% usage and the system slowed to a crawl.

Eventually I tracked the problem down to ACPI.sys. It wasn't till I read saik0's post that I tracked the root cause down to the Realtek NIC. Interestingly the high CPU usage persisted even with the device disabled in Device Manager. It wasn't till I unchecked "Allow this device to wake the computer" and rebooted that the problem was solved.

Thanks saik0. If It hadnt been for your post I would undoubtably still be struggling. It seems you were also right in your assessment of the woth of contacting the MOB manufacturer. I had also loaded the latest NIC drivers.

 

[alsta]

Hello! My PC struggled with this problem long time. I updated all drivers. Wrong desided that motherboard Asus P5ND2 SE is damaged.

My solution lays deeper - in BIOS. I entered Award BIOS, finded Chipset settings, LDT frequency. It has multipliers x2, x3, x4, x5 whitch change data frequency between south and north bridge. Default was x4. I risked change to x5. If computer became unstable, I could go back and choose another value. SUCSESS.
Returned to Windows 7 and find CPU at 1%.
Aterwards (it is not necessary) changed BIOS value to default, but Windows 7 keeped stability and interrupts at 0%.
That is My case. I think, that it covers driver changing and some other solutions, because it goes deeper - straight into computer stability.

 

[Andreyash]

Hi guys. I though I am the only one with this problem

The source of my hardware interrupts is also ACPI.sys. One core of the double core processor gets accupied with hardware interrupts even when idle. But it does not seem to be connected with power saving features. It only happens when I play games and the system is under stress. Not likely to be a heating problem (although not sure) as CPU is never above 75 and GPU above 65. The system does not return to normal even after reboot. Only uninstalling/reinstalling/updating some systems utilities helps (like ACPIATK or Intel Management Interface or videocard driver or BIOS update). Then I play for 10 or more minutes and the same problems shows itself again.

I am really lost and do not know what to do

I have a newly bought Asus N43sn notebook, which I do not know and not going to open myself.

 

[BrineyEye]

Firewire box was the problem

My excessive hardware interrupts were being caused by a Presonus Firestudio 2626 mic preamp box. I found it by disabling things in Device Manager one by one until I got to the 1394 controller and viola! the interrupts went to near zero. So I reenabled it, interrupts went back up, turned off the Presonus box, and back to zero. Time to RMA (again) or junk it, I guess.

Hope this helps somebody.

 

[Lau999]

Hello !

Hardware interrupts are caused by my presonus external sound card too ( a Presonus Firestudio Mobile) ... When I disconnect it , hardware interrupts is normal, otherwise 30 % or more...
Is anybody know how to resolve this point please ?

Thank You !

Lau

 

[RSwan72]

I was having "Interrupts" issue too, when waking my computer up from sleep mode. It was causing my core thread #6 to run almost 100%. I found a solution to the problem. I had turn off my Page Files because I have 12 GB of ram and use a solid state drive. I discovered when I enable hibernate the problem went away, but that uses up 10 GB of drive space and I never use hibernate mode. The trick that worked for me, was to turn Page File back on at no less then 18 Mb. If I set it to 16 Mb, then the problem would came back. Let me know, if this helps anyone. Thx!

 

[yaorj]

Though through the Process Management Software (for me is Process Hacker 2), we can suspend such crazy thread in the "system" process (in my laptop, it is acpi.sys+0x1af7c), making PC runs smoothly but unstable, the faulty is that whole system is running without the problematic ACPI support -- which can cause many unsuspected problem from System Freeze to BSOD. Probably the final cause of this annoying problem is a defective BIOS file and thus the final solution is just to flash another "good" BIOS.

I have an ASUS N43sn Laptop with i5-2410 and GT 550M, and I only have the solution of such a model. For other brands, the problem is likely to be the BIOS, but I don't know what the exact solution is.So flash an old BIOS version from your manufacture's support site just at your own risks.

Here is my experience with my ASUS N43sn.
When I flashed the latest one (which on the support site is "BIOS 414" ) , the problem always appeared ,
but since I decided to flash the original one (which called "BIOS 205" ) , the problem has just gone , and everything runs smoothly.
"Rolling back" the BIOS must add something after the orignal command,
For ASUS with winflash software, just type "winflash /nodate" at the current WinFlash directory in the Command Prompt with Administrator Rights , choose the Ver.205 BIOS downloaded from ASUS's website. At least after that my laptop calmed down again from the CRAZY System Interrupts State!

Hope this will be helpful to everyone.

Sorry for my bad English. ^_^

 

[alsta]

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I have an ASUS N43sn Laptop with i5-2410 and GT 550M, and I only have the solution of such a model. For other brands, the problem is likely to be the BIOS, but I don't know what the exact solution is.So flash an old BIOS version from your manufacture's support site just at your own risks.
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Hi! Just the same case I have. It is described some posts above. I changed some motherboard chipset timings in BIOS.
Maybe you did something alike?
Bye!

 

[Michaelmc]

Problem solved

Thanks to all the contributors I solved the same problem on my work PC.

My first attempt was the PCI Quadro NVS video card, which didn't work. Second attempt was the Intel 82579LM Gigabit Lan adapter, disabled the 'Wake on magic packet' and ' Wake on pattern match' functions in the Advanced tab and the Systems thread CPU usage went from 30-50% down to 5%. PC is Dell Optiplex on Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit, Core i3 2120, 4GB RAM.

Thanks again guys.

 

[jezdec]

60% load of one logical CPU core

Hi all,
experienced the same problem, after awaking from hybernation, it felt down. My problem was second monitor connected through display port. When turned laptop on from the beginning, first core was steady at 60% usage, while the others were down. When disconnected displayport, it immediatelly felt down to 1% usage overall (all CPU cores summary). After reconnecting displayport, it was still down.

Hope this helps to some guys. Thank you anyway.

 

[Levo]

I have a Dell E6430S and I had the same issue, ~40% CPU hogged and the fan on all the time.
What helped me is Michaelmc's post, seems like we had the same issue.
I set the the two parameters he mentions to "Disable" and voile, fan stopped straight away

The path to use in case you are not familiar is:

Start -> Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Network Adapters
At this point, right click on the adapter you are currently using and choose properties
in the new window -> Advanced tab
and at the bottom of the left window you will see the two offending parameters

 

[kuchy]

Thanks to all the contributors I solved the same problem on my work PC.

My first attempt was the PCI Quadro NVS video card, which didn't work. Second attempt was the Intel 82579LM Gigabit Lan adapter, disabled the 'Wake on magic packet' and ' Wake on pattern match' functions in the Advanced tab and the Systems thread CPU usage went from 30-50% down to 5%. PC is Dell Optiplex on Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit, Core i3 2120, 4GB RAM.

Thanks again guys.

I have a Dell E6430S and I had the same issue, ~40% CPU hogged and the fan on all the time.
What helped me is Michaelmc's post, seems like we had the same issue.
I set the the two parameters he mentions to "Disable" and voile, fan stopped straight away

The path to use in case you are not familiar is:

Start -> Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Network Adapters
At this point, right click on the adapter you are currently using and choose properties
in the new window -> Advanced tab
and at the bottom of the left window you will see the two offending parameters

Thank you guys, I disabled these functions + some more functions in the same tab (in Network Adapter > Properties). I had this issue only after power up or wake from hibernation, every time going to sleep and wake from it solve the problem temporary.