System interrupt, CPU

Checking cpu spikes last night I ran across this. It would be interesting to know how high this number is for those having problems with pops & clicks. Enter task manager, performance, then click resource monitor. System interrupt can be found under the CPU listings. Check that with the AB connected, on and off.

Hardware Interrupts are caused by hardware devices which are plugged in. Here is what happens.

When you plug in any hardware, Mother board uses Interrupt controller (IRC)to multiplex the interrupts to the processor, which means these hardware devices cannot directly talk to the processor. This IRC will assign a specific interrupt line ( for 32bit there are 32interrupt lines ) , so one of the line would service the request.

Later Operating system has its own mechanism to service interrupts whch it does using IRQL and DPC . And all these happens on "specific bus"

device --> bus --> IRC --> IRQL --> driver enumeration.

After whicih the driver enumeration happens and the IRP would be processed / you can perform i/o operations

Hrmn.....most interesting. When you were monitoring this with the AB connected was it just idling or did you also check it while
sending audio to a DAW? It might also prove useful to A/B the AudioBox against a different manufacturer's interface to see if
this is common to all USB interfaces or just a quirk of the VSL series. It might not be the USB drivers alone causing this but
also the VSL streaming back and forth. When you say: "Check that with the AB connected, on and off." are you referring to
power or VSL?

Between working on my daughters lap top and testing this I ran out of time last night. I only checked it by turning the power off and on. I'll see what difference it makes tonight with play back and a mic. I will check the vsl also with an input. The AB alone gives it up to 10% on the cpu.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 16/01/2013 05:05:45

All the information I'm posting is from my desktop. While running the vsl my CPU usage is actually smoother than with S1. Not much difference in the total used. One thing I have noticed is both utilize only one core. Has anyone with the pops & clicks tried disabling hyper threading in the BIOS?

I still haven't found the cause of the spikes. Granted it's not bad and I'm not having any issues. It's like it throttles up and down. It will go between 3 & 25%. This is during playback with only a few plugins.

I can confirm the same.

When AudioBox is plugged in, the "system interrupts" are showing 10% CPU-usage in average, with spikes up to 50%.

When the AB is diconnected, they show 0% CPU-usage.

i haven't upgraded my 1818vsl drivers yet.... are you guys running v1.2.2 drivers?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 05/02/2013 13:30:47

I'm running the 1.2.1 driver now (PC), which helped a lot with the drop-outs.

It did not change the high CPU-usage of "system interrupts", though.

A run of latencymon might reveal some clues.

throw it on and let it run for about 30 minutes the copy and paste the info from the second tab into a response.

I've run Latencymon and it shows the interrupt. All the research I've done on the net comes up with a compatability issue with windows 7.

I noticed the same thing tonight and then found this thread. Just switching on the power on my 44VSL creates a 100% spike on CPU0 every 15sec or so. When running S1 I noticed that it used only CPU0 as well. I had three CPUs more or less idling and all the work on just one CPU, which resulted in overload and static cracking with just six instances of Presence.

I do mostly pure audio work so hadn't noticed the "crack issue" earlier. Is there a way to balance the load between the CPUs manually if the software can't do it (what it SHOULD do)?

Btw how do you check the version of VSL? The setup only shows the version of the driver.

Hey guys

With My FS Mobile when recording, I tend to have the latency samples at 128 or 256.. depends on guitar or jeys etc

I have'nt seen in this thread that anyone is talking about setting the latency samples
When playing back or mixing in a DAW You would want to have that latency sample up high... say 1024 samples

The crackles and such usually happens when it's set very low. That puts alot of strain on the CPU instead of the soundcard. The soundcard pushes it along alot faster and if the computer isn't fast enough to cope with that, it will give them crackle snap and pops

I don't know if this could be your issue, but I would check into that for sure
Changing the latency is done on the soundcards control mixer

If not for the thread starter then someone else perhaps

Ch33rs
Saga

Hi man! Not sure if you ever knew what this was. But believe it or not, after almost 3 years of working with an AB 22 vsl, Just now I found out that this problem goes away after changing poder saving options to "high performance" mode... Go figure...

Sorry!! taking my other post back.... problem persists... after I installed the driver. Should have checked first.