UNSOLVED Power Archiver Starter - CPU and power overhead

[PA_Fan]

I’m running PA 21.00.17 64-bit on a 64-bit i7 desktop with W10 Pro, latest version. This 32gb of installed RAM.

As I use the PA pbs system for a number of scheduled archiving operations throughout the day, PA Starter is set to load and run at system startup.

In the course of trying to identify some causes of slowness and bottlenecks in other processes, I notice that PA Starter (PAS) always runs at between 11% and 15% of CPU (see screenshot), usually at about 12-13%. This is by far the highest demanding process on the system, as shown by Task Manager. In Performance Monitor, PAS Average CPU is 8.32, with every other process at less that 1 i.e. in decimal places only.

Task Manager also shows PAS Power Usage as “Very High”, and is the only process shown thus.

I have looked again at the information about PAS at https://wiki.powerarchiver.com/en:help:details:powerarchiver_starter, which was last modified in 2016. The article states a low memory usage for PAS of 784k, which is fair enough, but it is the large CPU overhead which is of concern.

It is of course possible to change the PAS priority, but this has no effect on CPU overhead.

However, is it possible to change PAS, which is required only at intervals to initiate PA scheduled tasks, from consuming so much system resource for every moment of the day?

[Brian Gregory]

@pa_fan Something is very wrong.
The whole of PA should use only a totally negligible amount of CPU when it’s not compressing or un-compressing.

[PA_Fan]

@brian-gregory Thanks.

PA itself, when running but not doing anything, has almost no CPU overhead.

PA Backup, when running a scheduled (or ad hoc) backup compression job, uses anything between 10% and 25% of CPU when working on a .zipx file. Obviously this will change with the compression type and level specified for the job, and the CPU overhead goes up and down. I think it’s a good thing that PAB uses what it needs to finish the job ASAP, and of course, running these various backups is an intermittent thing, which I schedule for times when my system isn’t heavily loaded with, for example, a Macrium Image Backup and Verify. So no problem there, as far as I can see.

However, PA Starter loads at system startup, and runs with this CPU loading level all the time, until system shutdown. As I understand, its purpose is to manage PA backups, and I guess it interacts with Windows Task Scheduler, where the various scheduled .pbs jobs are listed. In itself, that’s a necessary interface with the OS, and one which requires the PAS job to sit in the background until its called upon to handle a .pbs. My concern is that a background, watching/waiting process constantly consumes this amount of resource.

I should add that I recall raising this some while ago, but various changes to this system and the applications I’m running on it mean that that I’d like to try to squeeze a bit more performance out of it.

[spwolf]

@pa_fan can you export and send to support at conexware.com your hkcu\software\powerarchiverint settings.

Seems like starter is stuck on something, we would like to reproduce and fix it in next release.

It should never take that much cpu time, it checks registry for new tasks every xx seconds, but that is not cpu intensive and it should be showing 0% otherwise.

[spwolf]

Additionally, backup tasks should be set via task scheduler.

Starter usually runs waiting for queue tasks.

[PA_Fan]

@spwolf Re: registryI’ll do that.

Re: Task Scheduler. All backups I have created and scheduled are listed in Task Scheduler. There is a curiosity, in that a .pbs appears in TS, but not in the pbs list in PA, and isn’t in the folder where I store all pbs files (the location of which is that shown for the job in TS). All very odd.

Am I correct in thinking that pbs scheduled jobs, which appear in the pbs list and on TS, but are not ticked for Queue under Scheduling Options must still have PA Starter enabled and running, or they won’t work? In other words, even if they appear as scheduled tasks in TS, they won’t start without PAS running in background.

Obviously I can test this by turning off PAS and seeing if the tasks due to run will actually do so, but I can’t do this right at this moment.

I have 7 running applications (Firefox, Tbird, FreeCommander etc.), with about 15% CPU, of which PA Starter is about 12.5%.

[spwolf]

@PA_Fan no, task scheduler starts pab, not pas.

Pas is used just for queue in this case, turn off the queue and disable pas in pas systray settings, and you will be fine.

[PA_Fan]

@spwolf Thanks.

That’s working fine, and scheduled jobs are running as required. As I mentioned in a previous post in this thread, my .pbs scheduled jobs are timed to run when other system jobs, like Macrium Reflect image backups, aren’t due or running; and vice versa.

However, I can see a situation in which I would want to use PA Queue, and thus need to run PA Starter, and I don’t think we yet have an answer, as to why PAS grabs so much CPU. I have previously used ProcessExplorer to lower the PAS priority, but this doesn’t appear to make any difference.