CA Firewall and uTorrent 7.x release high CPU problem and solution

[JohnPeter]

I had been using uTorrent 6.x and prior releases with little to no serious problems. When I updated to version 7.x of uTorrent, my CPU usage went very high, sometimes as much as 80%-90%. When I backleveled uTorrent to 6.x version, there was no CPU problem; CPU usage was well under 1%.

I tried many ways to diagnose this problem carefully. I successfully used Process Explorer to discover that the problem was that my CA Firewall was consistently using over 50% of CPU anytime I was up or downloading with uTorrent.

To my surprise, when running uTorrent 7.x the CA Firewall had created several instances of uTorrent (or it had detected several instances of uTorrent running). In my Firewall Applications listing page, there was a "uTorrent.exe", a "uTorrent.exe_1", and a "uTorrent.exe_2". ((Note that the number is on "exe", not the application name.))

I deleted all three. CA Firewall recreated each one. This means that I have three separate listings of uTorrent on my CA Firewall page.

Now, why would this make a difference in CPU usage??? It was apparent that the rules I had created to allow uTorrent to access TCP and UDP ports was **ONLY** listed for the first instance of uTorrent. I went in and created access rules for the other two instances, identical to the access rules I had created for the first instance ..... total CPU usage dropped to 1%-2% - just like the uTorrent 6.x versions.

So the "problem" is that when multiple instances are created, the rules are NOT copied over. When the same rules are used, the CPU usage drops significantly.

I have noticed that several other of my applications are listed more than once in the CA Firewall Application page. This includes Google Desktop search (two instances). I have opened a problem report with CA to understand how and why these instances are created. I will append here if I learn more from them.

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My apologies if this has already been addressed. I did search and did not find anything directly on topic.

JP

[Ultima]

That'd be a problem with CA's Firewall being stupid, I guess... I've never had problems with multiple instances with KIS while I was using it.