MC16 gets to a point where it starts using 60%-90% of a dual pentium 1.8Ghz processor when all it is doing is playing files over a wireless network in theater view. How can this be?
It starts out using 5% - 20%, and no problems. Eventually, between 1 and 3 songs in, the cpu starts going crazy into the 60-90% range, and eventually the music stops playing,,, and when I get out of theater more, it shows a status of "Buffering." Sometimes it is using 100% of the right-most core, and 70% of the left-most core as shown by the task manager's performance screen. If I hit the stop button, it stays in the 60-70% range. If I exit MC16, CPU utilization goes down to 1% - 5%.
Will rolling back from MC16 to latest MC15 stable release likely solve this problem? ..and if I roll back, will I loose the customizations I made to theater view? (this problem existed before the customizations, BTW)
Incidentals:
1) Windows Vista 32bit, running on circa 2007 hardware
2) 1GB DRAM (with usually 200MB to 400MB physical memory to spare)
3) Playing flac, aif, and a few mp3
4) Via Wireless-G, MC is seeing a library on another machine over a windows network.
a) wireles-G connection bit rate is usaully no less than 18Mbps, sometimes 36Mbps, and never lower than 12Mbps.
b) network load is usually 4.6Mbps, 1.4Mbps, or 320Kbps, and at max it is 9Mbps (for the one 5.1 24/96 album i have).
c) at first I had pinned it on the network connection because I tended to see the problems while playing 4.6Mbps titles. But then three data points contradicted that hypothesis i) running the 9Mbps title did not make the problem worse or have any affect; ii) the problem occurs just as often playing mp3 files; and iii) task manager shows plenty of network bandwidth when the problem happens. this is how I discovered that the problem was around the cpu usage, it's the only resource that becomes taxed during the failure. So it seems that the problem creeps in when decoding flac or mp3, but does not come in when playing straight PCM files stored as aiff.
5) IE8 (not 9)
6) Latest MC16 as of this morning, I think it is v.042