CPU spike with an audio hang-up, help

[Milos224]

A very brief audio freeze, exactly with the CPU spike. It doesn't really happen often, but when it does, it's annoying when just playing music.


I'm somewhat familiar with the tracing thing, the command
xperf -on PROC_THREAD+LOADER+PROFILE+INTERRUPT+DPC+DRIVERS+POWER+IDLE_STATES -stackwalk Profile -BufferSize 1024 -MinBuffers 256 -MaxBuffers 256 -MaxFile 256 -FileMode Circular


here's the recent trace when the problem happened, right towards the end
Dropbox - CPU spike.rar


I'm suspecting it's something to do with the USB HSPA modem (Alcatel X090S), I have to use it right now for the internet. The thing is on manually installed Windows 7 drivers just so it works. If I got some research right, the driver's jrdusbser.sys. I don't think there's any Win 10 driver for it.


I would like to be a bit more sure if the modem's the problem and not something else. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[OldGrayGary]

Hi Milos224 ... and welcome to the forums ...


Sorry for the very late reply .... things have been busy! ....

Were you able to discover & solve the audio problem yet?

I did take a look at your trace, but I couldn't see anything definite. The latency and interrupt counts seemed decent to tolerable. The only spikes that I noticed seemed regular enough that they wouldn't predict the audio pause (the spikes I saw the most were mild, and fairly regular, while you mention that your audio issue is fairly irregular and infrequent).

I also looked at the driver situation for your Alcatel X090S - only a brief look, so far: but not much out there that shows anything more recent than Windows 7 support (as you noticed already). An Alcatel site in Norway has files to download, but not much information on them: what versions, operating systems, dates of release.... Here's the site, if you are able to extract more information from it than I did: ALCATEL ONETOUCH - Norway - Products - Download - ONE TOUCH X - 3.6 MBPS

I imagine if the audio interruptions are few and brief, you might find relief by limiting any background tasks during the listening times: turn off optional components like instant messengers, extra tabs in browsers, limit background Windows tasks such as indexing (you can check in Task Scheduler) .... things like that.

Make sure that you don't have overlapping protectors, too, that might be clashing in the background: only one real-time antivirus, only one firewall. If you have Live Tiles on the desktop (for news, mail, money, sports, etc. [many of these come automatically enabled with Windows 10] by all means turn those live tiles and notifications off - especially if you don't want them in the first place. You can pick and choose all sorts of notification categories ... Start Menu > Settings > System > Notifications.

See if any of that helps

 

[Milos224]

Thank you very much for the reply, OldGrayGary! Yes, that's completely right, it's happenning irregularly and not that often. Last three days it didn't happen at all (fine by me, there were similar, no problem intervals before too).


I'm happy to hear that trace isn't giving something too much out of order, thank you again!


Live tiles are turned off since the installation (yeah, I never really wanted them), no real-time antivirus... It might be Chrome acting up for all I know so I'll keep number of opened tabs more reasonable. In the meantime I did turn off Chrome's hardware (GPU I think) acceleration just in case and updated AMD GPU drivers.


Once I get rid of Alcatel's modem, maybe all will be solved.


If the problems do get much more frequent, I'll be sure to stop by here again.

 

[OldGrayGary]

Glad to hear that things have improved. You can check in on Chrome's extensions (in its settings). Might be some interruptive elements there.

Go ahead and let Windows Defender and Windows Firewall run - they don't have much overhead, and you can schedule when Defender runs its scans (you can have these happen only when you choose). If you go on the Internet much, at least Defender will give you some basic protection.

Cheers ... and congratulations on your good work.