Hello Display Fusion Team,

I'm running Display Fusion Pro 7.1 to support 2 monitors at work and I'm having the following difficulty.

After about 5 days, my system becomes very sluggish and Display Fusion uses up a lot of CPU (30~40%). The system is so slow that it will take the mouse several minutes to move at times and takes about 30 to 40 minutes for me to open task manager, even using shortcuts, to shutdown Display Fusion. I observed the Windows UI having a very difficult time painting windows when my system is in this state, and typically see the taskbar on the secondary monitor be out of sync on time. The taskbar will often restart and repaint when in this state. That was my first clue that it might be related to Display Fusion. After Display Fusion is shut down, I can use my system again. Restarting Display Fusion does not resolve the issue, as the issue will re-surface in about 30 minutes. The only effective solution at the moment is a system reboot, which will buy me about a week before my system becomes unusable (or at least very difficult to use)

I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64, and the system is managed by the IT department.

Let me know what I can do to get you the debug information you need to get to the bottom of this. My system is very heavily used. I will often have about 40 to 50 tabs in Chrome open, as well as 1 or 2 VBox VMs running. I do development and debugging on this workstation and do a lot of research. (I have ensured that my problems don't go away when I close down Chrome or the VMs) However, this may be getting Display Fusion into this state.

Let me know what information you need and I will do my best to get it to you.

Cheers,
-Paul D.

Hello Kieth,

Thank you very much for your response!

As fate would have it (4th law of posting issues to a support forum), I have not encountered the issue yet this week. Which is really pleasant.

Should this happen again, I will follow your instructions and post the support text from the application.

Cheers,
-Paul D.

Hello Kieth,

It looks like I may be at the start of a repeat.

I collected the logs and perhaps you can have a look and make some suggestions.

Cheers,
-Paul D.

CPU percentage was at 25~35%

Typical is < 12%

This is usually where the problem starts. The sluggishness shortly follows.

Cheers,
-Paul D.

Hello Keith,

I think I have a good reproduce of this issue. This is with 7.2.0 Beta 3. I'm upgrading to 7.2.0 Beta 5

Please see attached.

The first is the support output.
The second is a mini-dump and screenshot from Windows for the process. The Thread that is of particular interest is TID 6836 This is the one that is usually clocking about 35+ CPU %.

Thanks in advance!

-Paul D.

I think I have this issue as well. My CPU is sitting at 13% for DisplayFusion, but I think that's it's basically maximizing one of my 8 cores. I really see the problem when I click on a program in the task bar or try and bring up Display Fusion's settings. For example, right-clicking the DF taskbar icon takes 3 to 5 seconds to respond. The settings window took three minutes to appear, and clicking tabs within the settings window all took quite a long time to respond (a minute or more each time).

Clicking on programs in the taskbar of my main monitor does not result in the delay.

Logs and troubleshooting info attached. Note that while it is showing a lot of CPU use for the Settings Window, that's because once I open it, Settings becomes the CPU "capture" for the spike. When the settings window is closed, all CPU is being spent on DisplayFusion.exe.

El Tea

I should mention that rebooting clears this up for me. I'll be watching to see if I can spot the trigger.

Mike

If there's a trigger, so far, the only one I've found is "time without reboot".

I must have updated to a newer version recently because I see that DF is back in its default place in my start bar. This tells me the issue was introduced with an update. Is there a log file where I can check when I last upgraded? Can I go back to a previous version?

I haven't yet tried the Beta. How stable is it? I don't fancy things getting worse!

Looks like about a day. If you can see the date/timestamp on my post above about rebooting (it only says "one day ago" to me) that was my last reboot, then the issue appeared this morning.

It also doesn't appear to be a sliding scale. I think the issue simply triggers and goes from zero CPU usage to maxing out a core. I'll watch for that as well.

Happened overnight while computer was idle.

Watching the task manager right now. It's now fluctuating from 0 to 2 percent, and the memory is bounding between 75 and 81M every few seconds.

The only new piece of software I'm running is VirtualBox, but it has been up and running as I've had this issue.

Another data point. I was actually at my computer most of the day today and kept the task manager open the whole time. DF has been slowly, linearly, climbing in CPU use throughout the day. Since my morning reboot it now bounces to 12-13% (refresh on task manager: 0/1/10/0/0/13/0/3/12 etc). So it is definitely something getting worse over time. But it also doesn't get fixed by reloading DF - only a reboot clears it.

I still haven't installed the beta. Will do so tomorrow.

Hello Keith,

I have beta 5 installed and so far, so good. My problem is a little different than Mikes, as mine takes a few days to a week to manifest. After some investigation, Google Chrome may be involved somehow. I run many, many tabs for research. Typically, I run 3 Chrome windows with ~ 15 tabs each on monitor 2. Some of the pages are flash heavy, and they chew up CPU, which is usually when I begin to notice trouble. I've tried the compatibility tab under the Display Fusion configuration and disabled the hooks and menus for Chrome, which seems to have helped a little.

Any suggestions?

I too run Virtual Box, but I haven't noticed it causing any issues directly related to Display Fusion. It usually runs on monitor 1. It is CPU heavy (no surprise) and I notice issues when it gets into contention with Display Fusion for CPU cycles. However, I don't think it is part of the problem.

-Paul D.

In looking for common "threads" (haha) I run Chrome as well. One or two windows with 8 to 15 tabs total.

Thanks for the heads-up.

I will get and install it. I was running Beta 5, and it seems to be working so far.

Cheers

Hi Keith, I'll also post a separate thread but I'm on the latest beta 8 and it's now to the point where DF is pegging CPU on more and more apps which I then must exclude, and now is almost tipping the scale of the primary apps all being excluded from DF making me wonder why I am running it anymore.

For me, a common app like MPC-HC media player which never had this much issue before now also is fine only once I set it to a full "7" compatibility meaning fully exclude. I bet this thread creator just has some apps also like this.

Here is a list of all the apps I must excluded just on this one PC otherwise DF makes the machine unusable and kills CPU:

VMware multiple windows/apps
Onenote
Crashplan
Teracopy
MPC-HC

I believe my other desktop machine has a longer list but wanted to add I just noticed my laptop being absolutely killed by DF and low and behold after tkttaking the time to trial and error, turns out MPC-HC media player being hooked causes latest beta DF to spike the CPU, like Crashplan, teracopy, vmware, and the others in my list.

I hope you can fix this, if I exclude much more commonly used apps, I may as well just kill DF as it's the DF buttons to swap monitors, etc on these very apps that I really want to use it for! Let me know if I can help troubleshoot more.

Thanks!

Hi Keith,

Did you mean we should enable the setting for "Disable Taskbar BUTTON Progress Overlays"? I do not see just a "disable taskbar progress overlays" so I want to confirm.

Also, can I ask what exactly are the "taskbar buttons progress overlays"? (assuming this is what you meant)

Is this strictly for troubleshooting purposes and is this something one would really want to leave enabled under normal circumstances?

Thanks!

Collin

Hello,

Having the issue with high CPU usage 17% and above, and having now updated to the latest beta version you have on your website, I still have the issue. Once I turn DF off, my system goes back to normal. I too am getting to the point where I will have to uninstall DF. I love its features, but at the cost of such a high CPU usage it negates its benefits.

So to help you debug this once and for all, how can I help, to help your tech's out?

Regards,
Ron

I too am having this issue, and have had it for several years (paying customer)., across Win7 and Win10. The same symptoms for me - after running a few days, CPU starts creeping up, at some points burning up to 30%... however, the entire system is much more sluggish than just 30%, so there must be some kind of dramatic rate of task/thread switching happening somewhere, or a driver interaction throwing fits.

My setup is an Anker USB dock (displaylink standard).
When this is happening, it is jacking up WUDFHost.exe.
My belief is that this issue has to do with user-mode driver interaction for certain USB docking stations. The "virtual display card" that the USB dock represents might have something to do with the behavior.

My PC: Lenovo P50, 32GB ram, NVIDIA Quadro M2000M (4GB ram - but I don't think the Nvidia is in the mix here), USB DisplayLink USB device (Anker USB dock), dual 24 Asus PA-248Q monitors, one driven by DVI, the other driven by HDMI - both are plugged into the Anker USB Dock.
Windows 10 build 18362.19h1 / 190318-1202 (but I don't think Windows OS v matters, since this issue has persisted across multiple clean builds of Win7 and Win10).

FYI and I hope that helps with any troubleshooting or root cause analysis you can pursue.