MP11 hogging serious resources.

[jwalk]

After solving my WMP homegroup "play to" problems (seen here) rather easily, there's one thing I'm noticing as a drawback.

Every so often - and whenever I launch WMP, WMC, or browse any of my media libraries - a process called wmpnetwk.exe takes off and hogs some serious CPU and RAM. (Along the lines of >90% CPU and >75% RAM.)

In my Googling, I've found that you can halt it by launching services.msc and stopping the Media Player Sharing service. Those uninterested in sharing their media have disabled it altogether and changed the startup to "manual" and it solves their problem.

I, being interested in the Play-To feature and the fact that my desktop PC is active as a sort of media/file server for other computers on my LAN, have to keep this service running. I do disable it when it gets in my way, but I leave the startup option set to "automatic" in services.msc. Under system performance settings, I changed the prioritizer to schedule for programs rather than background services, and that seems to help a little, too.

Is this a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation? I want to have the sharing and streaming and all that enabled, but I don't want WMP to go through and re-index ALL my content every time I open a player or browse a folder. In my searching, I see it's been a problem for a while now, predating WMP11 and WMC by a couple years.

Does anyone know if there is there a way to control this runaway process?

 

[chev65]

My WMP indexed my 20GB of music which takes awhile to do. After it was done it stopped using the resources on my machine completely. It should only be indexing until it's done, after that it should stop. Depends on how much you have for it to index.

 

[jwalk]

Hundreds of gigabytes, and growing every day. Close to 65GB of music, and 400+GB of videos.

It seems to want to re-index the entire collection every time something gets added or removed, every time I open Explorer and navigate to the folders where the files are at, and every time I run WMP.

Just now, my CPU was at >90% and I could barely render this page in Firefox, so I opened services.msc and stopped wmpnetwk from running. But, when I navigated to the top-level directory where my music and videos folders are to check the properties, the service took right back off.

I've let it run overnight a couple times now, but it never seems to be done.

 

[chev65]

Let it run overnight, that much music and video's will take quite a while. It should stop eventually though.

 

[jwalk]

I should add that all my media lives on a couple external USB HDDs. Every time I disconnect one or both of the drives or if I reboot, everything needs to be re-indexed.

This is annoying at best.

Personally, I think it's a failure of programming to have huge media libraries indexed time and time again. Once it's been indexed, why does it need to be indexed again? Changes to the filesystem can also be made to any index, and it can be done on-the-fly. Also, why does a media indexer need ninety percent of my 3.1GHz CPU and three-quarters of my 2GB RAM?

Crazy.