Symbols are a great mess. In general, unless you’re willing to spend lots of time and risk being frustrated to maximum insanity there’s no other way than using the symbol servers (i.e. working with the debugger while online). Well in fact the debugger is trying to cache the symbols it downloaded, but it doesn’t always work…
The code the problem lies in the fact that there are too many Windows configurations/service packs/hotfixes to find the symbols that would exactly match your current system…
[quote author=Vlk link=board=2;threadid=3563;start=15#msg25837 dt=1080636877]
Are you sure it’s ashDisp.exe that’s taking up the CPU??
Twice it has been ashDisp.exe but I have not been able to reproduce the problem however after reading through some of the other replies for other problems I have found that running Shareaza will cause ashServ.exe to take up 98-99 percent of the CPU. It took about an hour for me to gain control back without rebooting. What I found was that ashServ.exe priority was set to high and task manager will not allow it to be changed to normal. The only way to gain control back is to Stop on access protection. I was able to stop the service through the control panel however it was reported back as unable to stop it. After stopping on access protection, I noted that the priority was then normal. I hope this helps.
Great mess…
Spend lots of time…
Risk…
Frustrated…
Maximum insanity…
There’s no other way…
But it doesn’t always work…
I give up! ;D
Can you at least tell me what if the ‘page faults’ into the Windows Task Manager (a column that could be shown there)?
ashserv.exe has a ‘million’ of page faults… more than any other application and/or service… Is this an error? Is it the cause of system failure or freeze?
Can you at least tell me what if the 'page faults' into the Windows Task Manager (a column that could be shown there)?
ashserv.exe has a 'million' of page faults... more than any other application and/or service... Is this an error? Is it the cause of system failure or freeze?
Well in a sense, it’s not ideal but it’s really not a problem either.
Page faults are caused by almost anything a program does - a ‘page fault’ is a process in which a piece of memory is being recalled from the paging file. Since ashServ.exe is polling the system (checking the status) in pretty short intervals (couple of seconds), if you have long uptimes, you’ll see a huge number of page faults. They accumulate…
Actually the current version of avast (4.1) is much better in this aspect than the original 4.0. In other words, we’re trying to push this value to minimum…
But is it necessary for ashserv.exe to have it’s priority set to high when it is running. Having it set so high makes it all but impossible to break out of it when it starts absorbing all of the CPU time. Also, do we know why it starts to run rampant bringing the rest of the system to a near halt.
For the time being, I have disabled P2P Shield and so far have not had anymore problems. But is still early as sometimes the problems are unpredictable. This may be a good place to start looking at the code.