Excessive CPU usage on remote PC

[paul89895]

I have been supporting my wife's 84 year old uncle remotely for many years using various versions of Teamviewer, and updating as the new versions came out.
Over the past 2 years I have seen the CPU usage on his end go up alarmingly, to the extent that it is almost impossible to do any remote work on his PC. Granted he has a rather old PC running XP SP3, but this worked fine with older versions of Teamviewer.
So my questions are:

1. Does anyone know why such high CPU usage could occur (as high as 90%) - he may have brought in some malware or virus that escapes the usual procedures that I follow to clean up his PC, but after I have done that it still consumes high CPU. We are using the latest version of Teamviewer.
2. Has CPU usagee of Teamviewer gone up  as new versions have been released? If so how can obtain an older version and install it on his PC. And can I control an older version remotely?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Paul

[matt]

If TeamViewer is switched off, does the CPU usage drastically lower?

I've not seen this, and I support quite a few Windows XP machines (even one Windows 2000 machine)

[Admin]

look up and run Rkill( http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/rkill/) then malwarebytes on your uncles computer and see if that helps.

[rdefuria]

I have TeamViewer auto-update set on my remote box (Windows XP SP3).

On Wed, Feb 19th the version was updated from Version 9.0.25942 to Version 9.0.26297

Since this update was auto-installed, teamviewer_desktop.exe has become a major CPU hog -- with cpu usage being 65+% when I am remotely connected.

I have rebooted; I have also done scans using MalwareBytes and Microsoft Security Essentials (both negative).

Anyone else seeing this?



I guess I could install the older version then disable auto-update.

[mesa57]

Yes, the same here. On what older machines TV is a CPU eater in terms of percentage.

[paul89895]

To reply to some of the previous posts:

1. I can see how much CPU is being used by Teamviewer by running task manager on the remote PC which did prove rather difficult when there were hardly any CPU cycles available.
2. Consequently use of a program such as Rkill was hardly much use but thanks for the suggestion.


I eventually came to the conclusion that, with any software these days, new versions are built for the latest CPUs and Windows versions and do not run very well on older machines. So I went back several versions and was able to get back a significant chunk of CPU cycles, at least enough to provide the remote support that is needed.

Thanks for any offered suggestions and I hope this proves helpful to thers that have similar problems trying to support older hardware/software.

Paul

[Midipunk]

I'm having this problem too.  Host machine is old DAW in basement recording studio (XP SP1), trying to control it with laptop from behind drums fifteen feet away.  The host has a couple rather expensive PCI interfaces with no driver support after XP SP1. 

While recording I'm at 3-7% CPU, with teamviewer running it's pegged 100% solid and eventually crashes...  Right about the same time I get a good take.
 

[Admin]

may want to try an older version of TeamViewer on the older machine:
http://teamviewerforums.com/index.php?topic=2167.0

[Midipunk]

Thank you I will and holler back.

[Kimh]

I have had the same problem. Try to disable the hardware acceleration on the remote pc.
The problem is sometimes caused by a lack of GPU power.

Right click on Desktop
Choose Properties
Choose Settings
Push Advanced
Go to tab: Troubleshooting
Set Hardware Acceleration to: None

If this works and the CPU load goes down you will have to buy a new graphics card.
The setting will have big influence on the users experience on the workstation.

Hope you find a solution if this didn't work

[Midipunk]

Thank you both!  I'm now recording with Host version 5 (latest version on client) at 30-50% usage and tickled pink! 

I first rolled back to Host 8 and disabled hardware acceleration, disabled logging and every other option and noticed slight improvement. 

If my music ever makes a penny will be back to purchase commercial version, thank you again.

[Admin]

excellent and thanks to paul89895 for the direction regarding older versions.
Sound like this resolution could help plenty who are running older hardware.

[rossmcm]

I'm a bit perplexed by this discussion over TV and 100% CPU usage.  I suffer from this problem also, and the hardware is not all that old.

I would have thought that running code on a faster processor would result in less CPU cycles being eaten up, not more.

I don't know anything about the internals of TV, but any program that spends most of it's waking hours waiting for something to happen shouldn't hog the CPU when it is waiting. 

So we have the case of TV7 running on a 2004 system quite successfully and cooperating with other applications such that all the applications run acceptably fast, and then the case of TV9 running on 2014 hardware bringing the system to its knees. 

Something has gone wrong.  Either:

• the algorithms in use by TV9 have been "improved" so that they use ten times the CPU processing power, or
  
• it's a bug.
  

R

[SawyerSLO]

i noticed in terms of videoplayback. Both windows RDP and splashtop outperform teamviewer and use less cpu and play youtube smoother.