The past few months I noticed that my mouse keeps freezing for a splitsecond every few minutes. This is super annoying and ruins my sessions of Battlefield 3 sometimes, since it always freezes my mouse at the most inconvenient moments.
So I opened perfmon.exe (Windows inbuild performance monitor) and started monitoring the various processes I had running during my game. Once the freezes started happening, I noticed Whatpulse’s CPU usage spiked. Stopping Whatpulse stopped the freezes from occuring.
The freezes do not seem to coincide with pulse events, they just happen on a regular-ish interval. I tried disabling the upload/download statistics and uninstalled WinPcap but that made no difference, it seems to be an inherent issue with Whatpulse 2.0. This needs to be fixed.
Edit:
I did some more monitoring, and the CPU spikes seem to coincide with a large amount of I/O activity by the Whatpulse process, and take place exactly every 5 minutes.
Edit2:
Judging from the 2.0.4 release notes (http://www.whatpulse.org/blog/106/) I’d say this is the issue:
Everything freezes up once it reads from the database.
Edit3:
Issue seems to be resolved (sort of) in the latest 2.1 beta. There’s still a I/O spike every 5 minutes but it doesn’t freeze up my computer any more.