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Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

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rlnoonan
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Joined: July 30th, 2018, 10:37 pm

Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by rlnoonan »

I recently discovered Rainmeter and LOVE it. I've been using it for a few months now and notice that the Rainmeter application itself seems to slowly increase its CPU utilization over time. After doing some searches I thought it must be some skin I had loaded, so I started the process of removing skins one at a time to find the culprit. As part of this process, I have been using a skin from JSMorley called RainmeterProcess that simply displays statistics about the Rainmeter process itself. Well, to make a long story short, I'm down to RainmeterProcess being the only skin loaded and the situation is still happening. So it would seem that it is Rainmeter itself, not any skins.

When I start my system up, Rainmeter typically consumes around 1% with all my skins loaded. However, this will slowly rise and in about three or four days it will be over 10% (it always bounces around, but spends more time above 10% than below it). I don't know if this will continue until it reaches nearly 100% or not because I've always restarted my system for a new trial with one more skin removed.

Here is a snapshot of RainmeterProcess after about four days as the only skin loaded (from the time of the restart):
rainmeter_util.PNG
I included the Rainmeter menu to show that RainmeterProcess is actually the only skin loaded. Ignore the 100% in the first column, I can't seem to stop that from appearing, even with a refresh. When Rainmeter is running right after a restart the current util numbers are around 1% or below.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I could be setting incorrectly? It doesn't sounds like this is typical at all and I really don't want to have to restart every week or so. I'm running Rainmeter version 4.2 and this is on Windows 7 Enterprise with service pack 1 (64-bit).

Thanks in advance for any advice.
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balala
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by balala »

First of all please give us a link where RainmeterProcess can be downloaded, to can check.
Secondly I never noticed a such behavior, however, what I'd try to do would be to load another skin, instead of RainmeterProcess. Does the same increase taking place in this case?
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jsmorley
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by jsmorley »

balala wrote:First of all please give us a link where RainmeterProcess can be downloaded, to can check.
Secondly I never noticed a such behavior, however, what I'd try to do would be to load another skin, instead of RainmeterProcess. Does the same increase taking place in this case?
https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?p=150953#p150953
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balala
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by balala »

I don't know if this skin and that one which rlnoonan talked about are the same, they can be, but the link you gave us is a newly uploaded and never downloaded package. Is rlnoonan working with the same skin?
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jsmorley
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by jsmorley »

balala wrote:I don't know if this skin and that one which rlnoonan talked about are the same, they can be, but the link you gave us is a newly uploaded and never downloaded package. Is rlnoonan working with the same skin?
Probably not. He is likely using an older one that used the Perfmon plugin. The one I linked to is updated to use UsageMonitor, and also is set up to support GPU when 4.3 is released to beta.
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rlnoonan
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by rlnoonan »

I'm sure I am using an older one, since it says "May 26, 2015" in the version. I'll grab the updated one and give it a try and report back.

Balala, I started looking into this because I was seeing this strange behavior when running with the skins I like to use. I only loaded RainmeterProcess as a way to track things as I tried to identify the skin that might have been causing the trouble. So the behavior seems to happen with any skin, which is why I was thinking there might be something going on in RainMeter itself.

As an example, my normal setup uses the following skins:
JSMeterVIII (Feb 7, 2017): Weather and Recycle
Mystic (v1.4): Dock1
illustroClipboard+ (v1.2016.11.17)
SysInfo (v1.0): a number of "strings" since this uses small separate items for each statistic monitored

I have tried other skins as well (like replacing all the SysInfo skins with ModernGadgets v1.3.1 CPU/Network/Disk), but I get the same behavior where the CPU utilization slowly increases over time. One other note that I failed to mention earlier is that as the utilization increases, Rainmeter becomes more sluggish. Loading a different layout of skins takes much more time than it did right after a restart (almost instantaneous) or pop up bubbles in the Dock skin come up slowly. The other thing that is strange is that exiting RainMeter and then running it again will not clear this up. The CPU utilization is the same right when it comes back up as it was when I exited. Only restarting the system seems to get things back to the original low utilization.

I do have a Windows 10 machine running Rainmeter that does not exhibit this behavior, but I cannot seem to figure out what the difference between the two might be.

Thanks for the help so far!
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balala
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by balala »

rlnoonan wrote:Balala, I started looking into this because I was seeing this strange behavior when running with the skins I like to use. I only loaded RainmeterProcess as a way to track things as I tried to identify the skin that might have been causing the trouble. So the behavior seems to happen with any skin, which is why I was thinking there might be something going on in RainMeter itself.
And what if you load no skins at all? Simply having loaded Rainmeter, but no skins? Does it behave the same way?
rlnoonan wrote:As an example, my normal setup uses the following skins:
JSMeterVIII (Feb 7, 2017): Weather and Recycle
Mystic (v1.4): Dock1
illustroClipboard+ (v1.2016.11.17)
SysInfo (v1.0): a number of "strings" since this uses small separate items for each statistic monitored
I think these skins shouldn't have to be a problem, none of them. I don't know each of them, but I don't think...
rlnoonan wrote:One other note that I failed to mention earlier is that as the utilization increases, Rainmeter becomes more sluggish. Loading a different layout of skins takes much more time than it did right after a restart (almost instantaneous) or pop up bubbles in the Dock skin come up slowly.
This is absolutely normal, I think.
rlnoonan wrote:The other thing that is strange is that exiting RainMeter and then running it again will not clear this up. The CPU utilization is the same right when it comes back up as it was when I exited. Only restarting the system seems to get things back to the original low utilization.
How do you exit Rainmeter? I'm asking this because there could be a situation when you think you exited Rainmeter, but in fact you just had unloaded all skins, without explicitly exiting Rainmeter.
rlnoonan wrote:Only restarting the system seems to get things back to the original low utilization.
And what if you log out, then back in?
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rlnoonan
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by rlnoonan »

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to answer each question:
balala wrote:And what if you load no skins at all? Simply having loaded Rainmeter, but no skins? Does it behave the same way?
I had thought about that but hadn't tried it since I was thinking that RainmeterProcess was about as lite as possible and sort of just a debug tool. I also wanted to keep tabs on the util of RainMeter itself, but I guess I could do that via the task manager's process tab. I'll give that a try later.
balala wrote:I think these skins shouldn't have to be a problem, none of them. I don't know each of them, but I don't think...
I would agree because the behavior didn't seem to change when they were not loaded. That was what made me think it might be RainMeter itself. The one caveat is that I was a little concerned about SysInfo because I am loading so many of the skins in that package. It basically has a skin for each individual statistic, so I'm loading 38 of them! Maybe that is too much, but if it were I would expect the utilization to be high right away as soon as they are loaded and active. That isn't the case and I seem to see the issue without these skins loaded as well.
balala wrote:This is absolutely normal, I think.
Really? I guess I wasn't expecting sluggish behavior at 10% or so. As an example, the dock skin pops a bubble up when you hover your mouse over it. Initially, this happens immediately, but after a few days when the util is up around 10% or so, I can see the redraws as the bubble fades in and if I pull my mouse off moderately fast the bubble shows up far away from the skin.
balala wrote:How do you exit Rainmeter? I'm asking this because there could be a situation when you think you exited Rainmeter, but in fact you just had unloaded all skins, without explicitly exiting Rainmeter.
I exit RainMeter by right clicking the icon in the notification area of the system tray and selecting "Exit" from the menu that pops up. I think that works because I no longer see the icon in the notification area and it doesn't show up in the task manager's process tab. Let me know if that is incorrect. I would actually be satisfied if simply exiting and restarting RainMeter would get me back to the initial utilization since that is much less disruptive than having to restart my system.
balala wrote:And what if you log out, then back in?
Actually, I hadn't even thought of that option. I can try it next time before restarting to see if it works.

I did download the updated version of RainmeterProcess and it is working nicely. The starting utilization no longer shows up as 100% all the time. Also, in the process of messing around with the skins and trying to get info for these posts I noticed something. I had been unloading skins by right-clicking each one on the screen. I happened to notice in the "Active Skins" dropdown that there was a skin loaded that wasn't showing up on my screen. It was a config skin for one of the packages. I immediately unloaded it, but I noticed it was in all of my saved layouts I had created. It is now cleaned out of them all, but I wonder if it could have been the source of the trouble? It was loaded initially during my test with RainmeterProcess only (that is when I found it and unloaded it). So I'm currently running a test where I restarted my system without that skin loaded and then I loaded some of my normal skins and the latest version of RainmeterProcess. After almost 24 hours it is looking promising (initial util of 1.0%, now mostly in the <2% range). I need more time though. Utilization going up a little from the initial makes sense, but wouldn't expect it to continue to rise from here. So we will see. I'll report back in a day or two.

Thanks again for all the effort to help out here.
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balala
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by balala »

rlnoonan wrote:I had thought about that but hadn't tried it since I was thinking that RainmeterProcess was about as lite as possible and sort of just a debug tool. I also wanted to keep tabs on the util of RainMeter itself, but I guess I could do that via the task manager's process tab. I'll give that a try later.
Ok, give it and let us (me) know what is the situation.
rlnoonan wrote:I exit RainMeter by right clicking the icon in the notification area of the system tray and selecting "Exit" from the menu that pops up. I think that works because I no longer see the icon in the notification area and it doesn't show up in the task manager's process tab. Let me know if that is incorrect.
No, this is ok. This is one way how you can completely exit Rainmeter.
rlnoonan wrote:Actually, I hadn't even thought of that option. I can try it next time before restarting to see if it works.

Ok, again, please let us know if it helps.
rlnoonan wrote:It is now cleaned out of them all, but I wonder if it could have been the source of the trouble? It was loaded initially during my test with RainmeterProcess only (that is when I found it and unloaded it). So I'm currently running a test where I restarted my system without that skin loaded and then I loaded some of my normal skins and the latest version of RainmeterProcess. After almost 24 hours it is looking promising (initial util of 1.0%, now mostly in the <2% range). I need more time though. Utilization going up a little from the initial makes sense, but wouldn't expect it to continue to rise from here. So we will see. I'll report back in a day or two.
Ok, we're waiting for the report. :thumbup:
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rlnoonan
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Re: Rainmeter CPU util slowly rising over time

Post by rlnoonan »

After another 24+ hours, things are looking pretty good. The RainMeter utilization seems to be holding steady at about 2% on average. Previously it would have been in the 4 to 6% by now. I'll see where things are at tomorrow before making any conclusions, but I do think there was something about that skin that wasn't visible on the screen. It may have been misbehaving and consuming more resources over time.

Anyway, I want to let it run as is for a little longer so that I can be a little more certain of the numbers. After that, I can check out some of the other items I was going to try and report about.
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