Runaway CPU usage of a2service.exe

[spcrngr 0]

Emsisoft Business Security 2021.4.0.10785.

It has been acting up since this morning (with a2service.exe consistently spiking between 10 and 20%).

Rebooted but the problem came back within the hour. No scans are running.

To be honest, this is very frustrating as it causes the fan on the machine to come on (and it is not the first time I have encountered a similar runaway CPU usage problem).

[JeremyNicoll 81]

Which version of Windows?   What hardware - does that cpu spike of 10-20% represent one entire cpu core/thread being 100% busy?

What else happened this morning?  Was the machine rebooted, restarted, woken?  Has a Windows Update just been installed?  Was a restart pending because of an earlier install?  Did you install or remove anything?  Does the eventlog show any other system problems, eg with any of the machine's disks?

 

You could choose, for now, to install the previous version of EAM by (on the current one) going to Settings - Updates - Update feed, and changing from "Stable" to "Delayed".  Once you've altered the setting, do an "Update" and EAM will download and install the older version.   Keep the setting at "Delayed" until you are willing to come back to the newest version - as soon as you change the setting back to "Stable" the following "Update" will again change the program version.

 

If you've had recent runaway CPU issues, did you report them?

[GT500 878]

8 hours ago, spcrngr said:

Rebooted but the problem came back within the hour. No scans are running.

By default Emsisoft Business Security checks for updates every hour, and if there's anything in the Quarantine then it will be automatically rescanned to make sure there were no false positives.

I recommend either deleting files from the Quarantine, or disabling the Quarantine re-scan feature (you can find it in the Advanced settings, both in Emsisoft Business Security and in the workstation or policy settings in your workspace at MyEmsisoft if you use it for online management).

[spcrngr 0]

15 hours ago, JeremyNicoll said:

Which version of Windows?   What hardware - does that cpu spike of 10-20% represent one entire cpu core/thread being 100% busy?

What else happened this morning?  Was the machine rebooted, restarted, woken?  Has a Windows Update just been installed?  Was a restart pending because of an earlier install?  Did you install or remove anything?  Does the eventlog show any other system problems, eg with any of the machine's disks?

 

You could choose, for now, to install the previous version of EAM by (on the current one) going to Settings - Updates - Update feed, and changing from "Stable" to "Delayed".  Once you've altered the setting, do an "Update" and EAM will download and install the older version.   Keep the setting at "Delayed" until you are willing to come back to the newest version - as soon as you change the setting back to "Stable" the following "Update" will again change the program version.

 

If you've had recent runaway CPU issues, did you report them?

Thanks for commenting!

OS Name:                   Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
OS Version:                10.0.18363 N/A Build 18363

Hardware: it's a Surface Laptop 2 (Intel CPU).

Looking at the behavior in Task Manager there are 8 logical cores but the a2service.exe process does not keep one 100% busy. However, overall CPU usage is still very high (consistently > 12%) for the process once it's in this "runaway" state.

It would have been woken from sleep, as it's usually "always on". I did reboot and the symptoms came back within the hour yesterday. 

The last Windows update was installed on 2021-03-10 (KB5000808).

The event viewer shows pretty much clean for yesterday with the exception of some DistributedCom errors that seem unrelated. There's a couple of non related warnings, and that's it.

Thanks for the suggestion to switch to "delayed" - will try that if the symptoms come back (just rebooted another time this morning).

[spcrngr 0]

15 hours ago, JeremyNicoll said:

If you've had recent runaway CPU issues, did you report them?

I had similar but not identical CPU runaway issues last year (in a2start and commservice) - but have not had the problem again until yesterday. I did report them (you can find them through my post history).

[spcrngr 0]

7 hours ago, GT500 said:

By default Emsisoft Business Security checks for updates every hour, and if there's anything in the Quarantine then it will be automatically rescanned to make sure there were no false positives.

I recommend either deleting files from the Quarantine, or disabling the Quarantine re-scan feature (you can find it in the Advanced settings, both in Emsisoft Business Security and in the workstation or policy settings in your workspace at MyEmsisoft if you use it for online management).

The quarantaine is empty, please see attached screenshot.

[JeremyNicoll 81]

23 minutes ago, spcrngr said:

I had similar but not identical CPU runaway issues last year (in a2start and commservice) - but have not had the problem again until yesterday. I did report them (you can find them through my post history).

Yes, I looked at your posting history yesterday and saw that you'd been part of that discussion (which started in Feb 2020):   https://support.emsisoft.com/topic/32777-high-cpu-usage-from-a2start-and-commservice/    But whatever caused that seemed to get fixed.  I wonder what's making your machine suddenly have a problem.

 

> Thanks for the suggestion to switch to "delayed" - will try that if the symptoms come back (just rebooted another time this morning).

While switching to "delayed" will perhaps temporarily solve your problem (it might not if there's an underlying problem on your machine), sooner or later the delayed feed will get brought more uptodate and you might see the issue come back.  Maybe Emsisoft support will want you to try to investigate what the cause is, before that happens. 

 

[spcrngr 0]

So far so good today (~5 hours in without problems). Will post back if / when the problem reappears.

It is very puzzling why it would suddenly start acting up. There were no environmental changes I can think of.

[GT500 878]

15 hours ago, spcrngr said:

I had similar but not identical CPU runaway issues last year (in a2start and commservice) - but have not had the problem again until yesterday. I did report them (you can find them through my post history).

I'm actually seeing consistent CPU usage from a2service.exe today on my own system, so assuming it has the same cause as the issue you're having I'm going to collect some debug logs for this and send them to QA.