100% CPU due to hardware interrupts?

[LordOfLA]

Hmm you know, if you havent already you may want to just format and start again, althoug i suspect hardware issues somwhere along the line that may be intermittant. I'd stronlgy recommend you start saving and looking into a new mainboard and probably processcor and network card too, depening on what your current setup is now and what parts are available for your existing cpu.

 

[st4rk]

A friend of mine had pretty much exactly the same problem, eventually he sent his HD back to dell and they replaced it after the new one came it did not happen again, it had to do with switching to pio mode, i am not exactly sure what that is but it seemed to definately be a hardware problem that was causing the raised cpu during winrar particularly and others. You might want to think about returning your harddrive if its newish or getting a new one.

 

[X-Istence]

It would make sense if it only happens during large file transfers. uTorrent uses a high amount of network traffic, and if the settings are too high, like LordOfLa said then it can cause your Network card to not handle it, and start hammering the CPU to let it know that there is new data.

 

[lynchknot]

erm...hehe, I hate to tell you guys but I haven't had the problem since post #13. I'm just trying to figure out how and why I had the problem and what fixed it.

 

[NoHWInterrupts]

I know, that this thread is super old, but it is one of those which comes first when you google "hardware interrupts utorrent".

So, i just wanted to say, that i suffered from this problem for some time and the problem was gone after i replaced the HDD. However, the previous HDD was healthy according to the test i've done - Spinrite, chkdsk - no bad sectors or whatever. The problem was usually present when i was downloading some stuff with utorrent on this drive. I tried to download stuff at the same speed (same torrent) to another drive that i happened to have and there were no problems. So i was compelled that the problem was in this drive and after replacing it it turned out that i was right.


Cheers.

 

[xoltri]

I just wanted to say that you may not need a new hard drive.

I had this problem recently also. I was trying to extract a RAR archive and it was going in surges, and taking over 30 minutes when it should take 5 minutes. I also noticed through process explorer that the hardware interrupts process was eating a lot of the CPU.

About a month ago I had a bad SATA cable that caused my hard drive to stop working properly. I have since replaced the cable but this is actually what caused my current problem. Let me explain...

Basically hard drives are allowed to access memory directly, called DMA, which allows them to run really fast without bugging the CPU which should be busy doing more important things than being a traffic cop. However if they start getting errors, such as when you have a bad cable, the computer says 'woah, we better let the cpu take control' and then flips the hard drive over to PIO mode which is much slower. The kicker is that it never flips back, even after correcting the problem.

So to fix the problem, I went to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware Tab ->Device manager. In here you will see an item called 'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers'. Click the plus sign beside this and you should see one or many Primary and Secondary IDE controllers. Right click on each of them and hit properties, then click the advanced settings tab. This window has a drop down, this should be set to 'DMA if available'. Below this there is a box for 'Current transfer mode'. If this is showing PIO mode, you will have to hit cancel on the current window, then right click on whichever IDE controller that you were in, and uninstall it. Then reboot your computer. After this you should notice that it reverted back to DMA mode, and it should solve your problem.

Hope this helps someone. I registered just to post this.