Forums / Support / What's up with the CPU usage being 100%?

What's up with the CPU usage being 100%?

by ChuckHarding @
Whenever i have BB downloading, the CPU
usage maxes out, and the viewer goes blank until all the files queued up have completed! I am running XP with all current patches installed on a 500MHz PIII with 768MB RAM, which should be able to handle the load. I have tried it with everything shut down that is possible with the same results.
 

BinaryBoy's reply to ChuckHarding #359 @

Go to the Logging tab in the Settings and make sure all disk logs are unchecked. Go to the Folders tab in the settings and make sure it's empty.
 

ChuckHarding's reply to ChuckHarding #360 @

Did that, usage is still at 100%
 

BinaryBoy's reply to ChuckHarding #361 @

Another possibility is that BB is spending a lot of time searching the Parts folder for duplicates. If that's the case, delete your old part files from the Master Reset window under the File menu.

Close and then restart Binary Boy. Set the Starting Point to Last 100 and click Refresh. Then download those. Does it spike to 100% during that download? If the CPU usage remains low, the problem could be disk swapping. The current Binary Boy version uses a lot of memory for each subject and it can be very inefficient, even on a system with a lot of memory, when dealing with more than a 100,000 or so subjects.

A short workaround is to disable "Download extended headers" on the Newsgroups tab in the settings, then delete the cache fiiles from the File | Master Reset window. Some servers require this to be enabled though. The code I'm working on now (mentioned on the patch page description of build 428) is far more efficient. It extracts very little information from the headers until it needs each one.
 

ChuckHarding's reply to ChuckHarding #362 @

I tried all of your suggestions and no difference was noted. It is during the download part that the CPU usage goes to 100% - as if the code for doing the download sets itself up to have so high of a priority that no other system services are allowed to run. (I am principly a Unix programmer and haven't done much in the Windoze arena so I am speaking from what I know about network programming etc.)
 

BinaryBoy's reply to ChuckHarding #363 @

Binary Boy doesn't raise its priority. You can lower it though by running Binary Boy from the Windows Start | Run window like this: binboy.exe -LTP

There's a test app you can try that will show whether the upcoming multithreaded code will help keep the GUI responsive for you. Click here. It doesn't need to be installed. You just download and run. It uses your Binary Boy settings to connect to a server and download articles. During the download, you can click a button several times to see if the GUI remains responsive.