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[glynor]

Here's one for the Weird & Wonderful thread...

A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to reinstalling Windows 7 (final) from scratch on my laptop, replacing the RC that I'd been using for months.  That all went well, but I was having some SERIOUS performance problems with MC.  In particular, it was performing TERRIBLY whenever I was accessing media files on a network or external drive, especially if the Library files resided on that same network/external drive.  CPU usage kept pegging out at 50%, and MC's UI would lock itself up constantly (it would "unstick" for a few seconds, and then lock up again).

Well, last night I figured it out and solved it, and I thought I'd share.

Turns out it was Microsoft Security Essentials, the new free Anti-Virus system from Microsoft (which is AWESOME, BTW).  The odd thing is that this issue only manifested on my laptop.  Even though I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials on literally ALL of my personal machines now, I ONLY experienced this issue on my laptop.  No idea why that machine is "special" in this regard, but this tip might help others who are seeing the same issue.  So, here's the story.

When I looked into it, I saw that at the times when MC was acting badly, it actually wasn't any of MC's processes that were sucking up all that CPU time... Instead it was a process I didn't immediately recognize called "MsMpEng.exe", which Google revealed to be part of the Microsoft Security Essentials (or the old OneCare) application.  It is always resident on my systems, but normally doesn't consume any system resources at all to speak of.... Maybe a 1-2% here and there, quickly dropping back to 0%.  However, nearly as soon as I opened MC, it would jump to 45-50% CPU usage (on a dual-core machine).  If I was patient and waited, it would eventually drop down to the 20-30% range, and that's when MC would come back and would again be "usable, but very slow", which is how I'd been suffering through lately.  I went into the Microsoft Security Essentials UI and disabled Real-Time Protection, just as a test.  Almost immediately, the process dropped to a still-overactive, but much more reasonable 5-10% CPU usage.

So, that was it.  Some sort of weird and only-on-my-laptop conflict with Microsoft Security Essentials.  Luckily, the Microsoft Security Essentials UI isn't dumb, and provides quite nice "exceptions" capabilities.  I simply went into its settings "tab" and then to Excluded Processes.  Then, I added exceptions for:

C:\Program Files (x86)\J River\Media Center 14\JRService.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\J River\Media Center 14\JRWorker.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\J River\Media Center 14\Media Center 14.exe

And the problem was completely solved.  MsMpEng.exe is now acting completely normally again and back to not using any system resources.  Even better, MC is now working PERFECTLY.

[JimH]

Here's one for the Weird & Wonderful thread...

So done.  Thanks for the details.

[DarkPenguin]

Are you sure you want to do that with JRWorker?  that one exists to run all the third party filters (codecs, whatever) that could crash MC.  (Crashes JRworker instead.  Which is fine.)  Comodo firewall likes to smack down JRWorker a lot.

All that said I've been running MSE with no MC slowdowns.

[DarkPenguin]

Forgot to mention.  I do have indexing turned (mostly) off in windows.  I found that was an issue with OneCare.

[glynor]

Are you sure you want to do that with JRWorker?  that one exists to run all the third party filters (codecs, whatever) that could crash MC.  (Crashes JRworker instead.  Which is fine.)

I initially tried just adding an exception for the Media Center 14.exe application, and it helped, but the stupid MsMpEng.exe application would still act up and suck up 10-15% CPU usage, with occasional spikes probably timed with when MC was building Thumbnails or something.  I don't think adding JRService.exe really had any effect, since I don't generally run MC that way on the laptop, but I figured why not at that point.

Either way, absolutely nothing makes it into my MC library from an unknown source without being scanned separately, especially on my laptop, so I think my threat impact from excluding MC is going to be quite limited.

And, just to reiterate... I've been using MSE on at least three other machines with an identical library (also on network and external drives) and have had no issue.  The only thing I can think of that is different on this one is that my main drive in the laptop is split in two, and one partition is an OSX (HFS+) partition (my laptop is a Macbook Pro, that I run in Bootcamp for Windows).  I use MediaFour MacDrive to be able to access the HFS+ part of the partition.  Perhaps having this additional filesystem driver, combined with how MC accesses disks, combined with MSE causes the problem.  Who knows though, because I wasn't actually USING anything on the HFS+ partition when I'd see the slowdowns... So it is just a complete shot-in-the-dark guess.