Game launcher consumes ridiculous amounts of CPU
The telltale game launcher consumes ridiculous amounts of CPU resources. I've noticed this behavior on the latest two episodes of S&M (3 and 4), haven't tried to see if the problem was present on any of the other game launchers yet.
If I start up the game launcher and then just leave it sitting there, after a while it suddenly pegs an entire core and just keeps consuming cycles for no reason until I shut it down.
Sometimes it does this right after starting, sometimes it takes an hour or two, sometimes it starts doing it after I wake the computer from hibernation (where I left it open before I hibernated).
If I grab the top of the window to move it, the CPU usage falls to 0% and jumps right back up to 1 core when I release the window again.
Using Sysinternals Process Explorer, I found the two threads that kept eating cycles (See attached SaM-threads.png).
The big sinner was thread 4824, you can see the function offset for yourself in the screenshot.
The stacktrace for this thread is in attached image SaM-Stack1.png
To the untrained eye it looks like a busy-wait in "IsNLSDefinedString" called from somewhere in QtCore4.
A second seemingly pointless consumer of resources was the WINMM.dll thread 1484. Stacktrace is in attached image SaM-Stack2.png
Considering the launcher window is just sitting there and not animating or playing sound or doing anything at all, it really shouldn't eat one of my cores.
I should note I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, and my firewall stops the launcher from going on the internet.
Hope you can fix this
Edit: I checked the issue again and noticed I get a different stack trace for the overactive thread 4824 every time.
QtCore4.dll, QtGUI4.dll, and QtWebKit4.dll are running constantly.
If I start up the game launcher and then just leave it sitting there, after a while it suddenly pegs an entire core and just keeps consuming cycles for no reason until I shut it down.
Sometimes it does this right after starting, sometimes it takes an hour or two, sometimes it starts doing it after I wake the computer from hibernation (where I left it open before I hibernated).
If I grab the top of the window to move it, the CPU usage falls to 0% and jumps right back up to 1 core when I release the window again.
Using Sysinternals Process Explorer, I found the two threads that kept eating cycles (See attached SaM-threads.png).
The big sinner was thread 4824, you can see the function offset for yourself in the screenshot.
The stacktrace for this thread is in attached image SaM-Stack1.png
To the untrained eye it looks like a busy-wait in "IsNLSDefinedString" called from somewhere in QtCore4.
A second seemingly pointless consumer of resources was the WINMM.dll thread 1484. Stacktrace is in attached image SaM-Stack2.png
Considering the launcher window is just sitting there and not animating or playing sound or doing anything at all, it really shouldn't eat one of my cores.
I should note I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, and my firewall stops the launcher from going on the internet.
Hope you can fix this
Edit: I checked the issue again and noticed I get a different stack trace for the overactive thread 4824 every time.
QtCore4.dll, QtGUI4.dll, and QtWebKit4.dll are running constantly.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
The launcher takes far longer for me to appear too if I launch it without internet connection, so I am not surprised.
No, this is an unrelated issue.
The snapshot is taken over 10 minutes after startup. As you can tell from the thread list, the mswsock.dll thread that tries to connect to the internet has already timed out and shut down.
I haven't noticed the launcher taking longer to start up whether my firewall blocks it or not.
I'm fairly certain it releases all the processing power. If I start the game and then alt-tab to the desktop, the game doesn't use any resources.
It looks like the problem is just in the Qt4 launcher part.