CPU Activity

[seekermeister]

I have noticed that the acs.exe is pumping up CPU activity to as much as 100% for about a minute after reaching desktop. Thinking that this was due to some kind of programmed scan, I went through the settings, but found nothing that would seem to relate. Any ideas on how to quiet this down?

[Manny Carvalho]

Is this sustained activity at such high levels or just spikes? Do you mean that it happens when you boot.

For me, normal activity is typically less than 2%. With OSS scanning it might be a little more but not much.

[seekermeister]

It is pretty much sustained, although as would be expected, varying somewhat. My primary means of monitoring this is via Process Explorer, and the tray icon seem to combine processes, only giving the primary process active, plus the total CPU activity, so it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how much acs.exe is responsible throughout the entire process, but one thing is clear, that it is the last item to settle down.

It is unclear to me...is acs.exe for only the firewall, A/V or both?

[Manny Carvalho]

Acs.exe is the OP service and includes both. When you scan for malware you'll see the CPU cycles go up in Process Explorer. But normally it's pretty low as my screenshot shows. I took while writing this.

If acs.exe shows constant high CPU then I'd first look and see if there's any network activity. That may be a problems. Although Process Explorer can tell you what's causing those extra CPU cycles I'd say that if you can't explain this easily with network activity or malware scanning then something is odd with the install. I'd remove OP in safe mode using clean.exe in the OP folder and reinstall with a fresh download of the latest version.

If this is just happening during boot up - which still isn't clear to me - then if it does settle down to a few % CPU cyles then there's not much to worry about.