Real Player causing 100% CPU

[rovingcowboy]

that would mean that the cda format must be controlled by realplayer, and that is starting when??? oh wait a minute.

GRW check your auto run and see what is told to handle the cd's see if that has realplayer set to handle the cd's.
if so change it to do nothing when cd is inserted. you might have to go get the autorun fix, i think thats the name, it will fix what windows has listed for progam handlers, its at majorgeeks.com to check and see what windows has then change
what is needed to change.

[GRW]

Hi guys, thanks for the fantastic response. All CDS are set to do nothing so that I can decide how I want them to be handled although here I was ripping straight from WMP. For ages I had an issue with MM locking the PC when ripping CDs (I won't go into that as the workaround is fine for me!). MM is set to control EVERYTHING to do with any format of music. Real player is switched off unless a file associated to it from the internet opens it but since I was not in the internet itself this shouldn't occur. (The only internet function was the retrieval of the tags).

The workaround is fine in ripping with WMP and then file monitor picks up the files and I use MM to do the rest. MM takes control of all the music on my library but this CPU issue was identical whether ripping on WMP or playing them on MM. Since the crash, all has been well and MM is behaving normally again. This was before I had a chance to try some of the things you mentioned or to defrag the HD! Why it started a few days ago and then has gone back to normal yesterday and the latter part of the day before I really don't know. Google threw up numerous articals about realplayer.exe causing 100% CPU that maybe this issue was actually part of something else - I knew that MM or WMP were not the cause but them being mostly affected by whatever it was.

I do still think with a few hundred CD singles added amongst other stuff the HD was struggling - I just can't figured out how it corrected itself. Or how Task Manager showed it when it was MM playing the track (Norton I can understand as it's probably just monitoring what TM is showing). I happened from the beggining so its not as if the PC was getting hot. It even ran at near 100% if a song was paused for a length of time!

As we are all OK I think I had better monitor this to see if it arrises again. I haven't seen any updates that may have corrected the issue so its a case of not fixing what's not broken.

Thanks again for the replies.
Gary

[rovingcowboy]

glad its working for you.

windows must have adjusted the page file. also it is possible that real player needed an up date and it found it when you went online.

[Vaskor]

I had a similar issue with realplay.exe taking up 100% CPU intermittently. I solved it by opening RealPlayer and deselecting the option to search for music/video files from time to time in my local drives. I suspect this is a programming bug in a recent version of RealPlayer.

[treeko1]

so how exactly would you go about changing that option?

[JohnJ9]

I ran into this and figured it out. It started happening after an update I picked up a couple weeks ago. It turns out, the behavior is that realsched is reading an option for realplayer where it can monitor your library and watch for new arrivals. By default, there are a few directories set up to be monitored, and a default period of checking once a minute. realsched spawns an instance of realplayer that chugs through your specified directories full tilt boogie on one core, and will read until finished. On my system, it would read 12gb of data before finishing, then doing the same thing again in a minute. I turned the option off in the Libraries settings, and the problem went away. I couldn't find a posting that had the actual problem and solution anywhere using Google, so I thought I would post this here so that it could be tripped over should it happen again.

[rovingcowboy]

Great going in and closing all options in real player again blocking realscheduler in the firewall and setting its priority to idle again. I've been going crazy trying to catch what was running in my system and causing wupdatexe to hog memory, thus stuttering my sound, sine this is updated it must be the one i couldnt catch.

[novice]

You are correct - after an update on realplayer tonight, the system was unresponsive - I found three highly intensive CPU processes running as "realmanager" - not sure why, but completely uninstalled realplayer until it is fixed.

[rovingcowboy]

Yeah and look for the message manager from real player that popped up on me and i had it turned off so it had some hidden one that left it on. I hope i got it off for good this time. But the stuttering is back so i'll more likely remove it too i have other ways to get real music files converted to mp3's so dont need real pain in as... player anymore.

[rovingcowboy]

Took real player out got louder sound now none of the volume settings have changed anywhere on system so real player appears to have been the bain of my troubles, am still checking to see if sound stutter is gone.

[GRW]

The issue is back again for me, low and behold after a Real Player update that too keeps popping up the message centre thingy!

I never use Real Player and it's only here because I thought MM used it somehow. Am I to assume I can remove it without causing issues with MediaMonkey, Windows Media Player or web videos? I can't remember the last time it was used in earnest?

[GRW]

By default, there are a few directories set up to be monitored, and a default period of checking once a minute. realsched spawns an instance of realplayer that chugs through your specified directories full tilt boogie on one core, and will read until finished.

Just tried this literally minutes after my last post and CPU is 8%. That certainly looks like it could have been the culprit. If so, as I was adding to the library RealPlayer was keeping its library updated so WAS causing the 100% that Norton confirmed and not confusing another player instead. Doesn't explain the playing issue from months ago but that is ancient history now!!! Thanks John J.

[Lowlander]

MediaMonkey doesn't require RealPlayer to run. It is only needed if you have files in Real formats.

[monkey hi fi]

there use to be a tara plugin for use in playing real format files. not sure if it is still on winamp site or not?
but that might save you troubles caused by that real player, if you need to play that format.

i converted all those formats to ones mm will play.

rovingcowboy / keith hall / monkey hi fi