nRF Connect (PC version) gets sluggish, svchost.exe CPU load increases

[gnf]

I am using nRF Connect (PC version) a lot to debug my application. I am using a PCA10040 board as dongle and everything works fine most of the time. But after I keep the nRF Connect application running for a long time (an hour or maybe more) the fan on my laptop is spinning up. In Process Explorer I can see the svchost.exe process is keeping one CPU core busy and after a while the responsiveness is becoming sluggish. Finally when I press the Start scan button I only get the Windows spinning waiting symbol.

If I close nRF Connect I see the svchost.exe load dropping down to 0% and I can reopen nRF Connect and start over. I am now doing this a couple of times per day and it is quite annoying.

It feels like some internal structure in the program is becoming too large after a while. I don't think it has to do with the logfile size, my last one was around 600 kB.

[ketil]

Hi,

I'm looking into this and will get back to you.

Ketil

[ketil]

Hi again,

Just talked to the nRF Connect for Desktop team and we have not seen this issue before. We would like to try to reproduce on our end and would appreciate it if you could elaborate on the following:

1. Which app are you using within nRF Connect?
2. What are you using the app for?
3. Which service is consuming resources? 

You can find details about services by right-clicking on svchost.exe:

Ketil

[gnf]

Ok, I'll try to answer:

1. Bluetooth Low Energy, official, v2.1.0

2. Connecting and disconnecting, bonding, reading characteristics. Connecting to a PCA10040 board with software compiled from SDK 14.2

3. No, you can't do that. It will only show a list of ~100 different processes. It is not possible to see which of them is active at the time.

[ketil]

Hi,

Can you try Windows Task Manager -> Performance (tab) -> Resource monitor (button) -> Services (button)

This will give you a list of running processes and you should be able to sort and find any services that are running hot.

Ketil

[gnf]

Ok, right now I have this situation again that svchost is using almost one whole CPU core. As you can see the average CPU load is around 23% but there is no trace of this in the Services tab:

The same goes for Process Explorer. 23 % load on the svchost.exe but still no trace on what's happening "under the hood":

Edit: I just closed nRF Connect. Now look at the CPU load of svchost:

[ketil]

Thank you for the detailed screenshots. We can't see any immediate solutions but we have a suspicion that it might be related to McAfee Antivirus. Could you try to temporarily disable McAfee or whitelist nRF Connect?

Ketil

[gnf]

Oh, I wish I could. I am locked out of doing just that here at work, sorry.

[ketil]

OK. Would it be possible to ask your IT department to make a global exception for nRFConnect?