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1.1.6.1: Occasional 100% CPU usage, and all downloads stop!


Grnch

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Occasionally, uTorrent's CPU usage will shoot up to 100%, and it will stay there for a long time (1-2 minutes or more). During this time, all downloads and uploads stop, but the GUI is still responsive (I can click on menus etc). I have verified that it is uTorrent that is using the CPU by looking at Task Manager.

It seems to happen quite often lately, ever since I put a few large torrents (several gigabytes) in the queue containing a bunch of RAR files, but I'm not sure this is the real cause. The queue is set to download one torrent at a time, but I have started the second torrent with "Force Start", if that means anything to you. However, the bug still happens occasionaly even with one torrent.

I've been seeing this bug in all releases since 1.1.5 (maybe even 1.1.4, but not sure) with varying frequency, but it's definitely there, it happens several times per hour.

Others have reported a similar bug, but it got blamed on NOD32.

Well, I don't use NOD32 (never have), and Kaspersky's real-time protection was completely turned off. It makes no difference.

One more thing, not sure if it might be related, I use uTorrent mostly through Remote Desktop (it's installed on a different machine). The machine itself is reasonably fast, it's an 2800+ Athlon with 1 GB of RAM.

This is a serious bug, since these frequent interruptions make downloading very slow, hence rendering this program completely unusable for its main purpose, which is downloading torrents.

Let me know what I can do to help you debugging this.

P.S. This bug happened several times while I was writing this post.

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Here's a screenshot to better show you what's happening.

The arrow on the left shows the CPU usage graph for utorrent.exe, you will see it has started its 100% CPU hogging a little while ago.

The bottom arrow shows the trafic usage graph, you will see that the blue graph (which shows upload speed) has dropped sharply exactly at the moment when the CPU hogging started, and since the upload is stopped, after a while the download also starts to falter and drops to almost zero, if the CPU hogging continues.

The top arrow shows the total CPU usage history, and you will see there have been 3 consecutive high CPU usage intervals within a relatively short period of time. All of them were caused by uTorrent.

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Here's a screenshot of the Advanced Options in uTorrent.

I have tried toggling the "Low CPU Mode" option on and off, it has no effect. Same for the "Slow Connect" option (but not 100% sure for this one).

BTW, I'm running WinXP SP2, but with tcpip.sys patched to remove the limitation on the number of half-open connections.

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Can someone use process explorer from www.sysinternals.com

Whenever this bug happens, can you double click utorrent.exe, click on Threads, and tell me the Start address of the thread that's using all the CPU.

Then if you are able to, click on the "Stack" button for that thread, and make a screenshot for me.

Redo the last step a few times (and make several screenshots). Not all of them should be the same.

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Ludde, you rule!!!!

Damn!

I found the stupid problem, it was caused by a Layered Service Provider, installed by SpamPal's transparent proxy. I noticed a spampalLSP.dll being loaded inside utorrent.exe's address space, looks like it is loaded for every program.

Apologies for ever doubting in uTorrent. :D

Now, the question is what exactly in uTorrent is trigerring a problem inside this LSP, seeing how it works just fine with all the other programs. But I guess that's a job for SpamPal's author to figure out.

Thanks again for the tip about ProcessExplorer.

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  • 9 months later...
Now, the question is what exactly in uTorrent is trigerring a problem inside this LSP, seeing how it works just fine with all the other programs. But I guess that's a job for SpamPal's author to figure out.

I just wanted to say that the lastest beta release of Spampal beta 1.73g is causing CPU problems because of Layered Service Provider installed by SpamPal's transparent proxy.

HOWEVER, the lastest release of Spampal 1.594 is working great with utorrent cause it does not include this transparent proxy utility.

I think it is important to say it cause I really like this two softwares and it would have been difficult to choose...

Maybe it could be worth it to say this int the FAQ.

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