The ten second iTunes CPU hog

August 6, 2007 9:08 AM

Itunes question: Every song I play gets a case of the slowdowns and cracks the CPU usages up to 100%, but ONLY from 0:10-0:20. Otherwise it runs fine. It never used to be this way. What's up with that? (details inside)

Details on my system: Athlon 64 3200+, 1GB ram, XP Pro. I'm running the latest itunes. Even though this problem didn't coincide with any itunes updates I did, I still went through all of the hassle of doing an itunes downgrade only to have the problem still be there, so I went ahead and re-upgraded. With firefox and utorrent running right now as well as itunes playing, my CPU usages is bouncing between 8-22%. Every song starts fine, but once it gets about 0:10 seconds in it gets plays in slow-mo as the CPU usage spikes to 100%. This only lasts until 0:20. Then the rest of the song plays fine. This happens on EVERY song. What's going on?

posted by thecjm to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Can you see what process is using all that CPU time? Have you verified it's itunes?
posted by cmiller at 9:46 AM on August 6, 2007

Are you running an anti-virus software that scans files as you open them? Norton in particular is notorious for spiking CPU usage.
posted by cosmicbandito at 9:47 AM on August 6, 2007

I can verify that the CPU spike is coming from itunes
posted by thecjm at 10:11 AM on August 6, 2007

Also, I'd totally understand if the files stuttered at the beginning or throughout their entirety. It would mean that i didn't have what it took to run itunes. But only happening from 0:10-0:20 on every song?
posted by thecjm at 10:13 AM on August 6, 2007

Could it be a hard drive or filesystem problem? Or have you looked closely at your iTunes configuration/settings? And does it happen when you use another program to play them, like Winamp or Media Player?
posted by davy at 12:06 PM on August 6, 2007

"100% CPU" might be including IO Wait time (it would on a UNIX system), so if iTunes is doing read-ahead caching, then it could be that. As for the stuttering, Check to make sure your hard drive is running in UDMA mode. It could be that it's dropped down for some reason (like if your hard drive and CD-ROM were on the same IDE bus).
posted by Laen at 4:23 PM on August 6, 2007

It was a DMA issue. It looks like one of my hard drives was running in PIO mode. I went into the BIOS and found that 32-bit mode was disabled for the drive. I enabled it, set it to UDMA and now iTunes runs fine. And I bet a few other things will run a lot better as a result. Thanks!
posted by thecjm at 9:07 PM on August 6, 2007