Hi all,

I mentioned to Thixotropic that I had been to a bad place with my pc's. I think I still need some help if anybody can assist.

I've been pulling out what's left of my hair trying to figure this out. My Win10 pc's (Used as 24/7 servers) slow down over a few days, and become unresponsive. A reboot sorts it out, but it can take many minutes for the pc to shut down. All pc's have Malwarebytes Premium, and run Acronis True Image 2020 (Which includes anti-ransomware protection). There are no obvious memory leaks or excess cpu usage in Task Manager, and "Reliability History" shows that all is fine. When they slow down, if you click on something, it may react a few minutes later. No weird overheating with fans maxed out either, they just stop doing anything ! Nothing obvious in Events either.

1. AMD Piledriver 8350 with 32GB RAM running Win10 Pro ver 2004 - This was my main server (TimServer). It ran BI5 as well as HomeseerV4, Emby, TVMosaic etc. and had done so for years. I have had to reboot it once a week for many months due to slow downs. I did a Win10 refresh, but it was the same soon afterwards. Nothing odd showing in Task Manager, and "Reliability History" was fine. Eventually it slowed down so much that I had to reboot daily.
At that time, I moved BI5 and TVMosaic (Including a USB S2 sat receiver) onto a spare Intel i5-3330 pc. I then put my spare TBS6921 S2 sat card into the AMD server. This broke everything. Com ports, usb etc, and random program crashing. Card removed, and pc wouldn't restart - found PSU had failed. Replaced. Various online anti-malware checks done with nothing found.

2. Intel i5-3330 with 8GB RAM running Win10. So this now has BI5 and TVMosaic on it and it became LizServer. I did try Emby and Homeseer as well, but it couldn't cope, so removed. I now have to reboot this pc once a week. First sign of trouble is BI5 recordings start playing in slow motion. Checked with the Missus, and TVMosaic was misbehaving too. Reboot and OK. Once again, there is nothing weird in Task Manager and "Reliability History" is maximum. Following reboot, previous BI5 recordings still start in slow motion, but new recordings are fine. PC is set for Max performance with no sleep etc.

3. AMD Ryzen 1800X with 16GB RAM running Win10 - Originally my main pc (ProjectorPc). I swapped this with the AMD 8350 pc. Seems to stay running for much longer than the other two pc's. Tried TBS6921 S2 card, which floored it. This again stopped com ports and usb ports from working properly. Card removed to be destroyed. This pc is now running Emby and HS4, and seems fairly stable.

4. Another AMD Ryzen 1800X with 16GB RAM running Win10 - My wifes pc (LizDesk). While all the above was going on, she complained that it was very slow. Once again, no malware, nothing in Task Manager or Reliability History. Another Win10 rebuild done. No complaints since...

So my question is, how can I pin down what is making these Win10 pc's unresponsive ? No visible cpu overloads, no visible memory leaks, just slowing down over time, as if something is filling up. OS hard drives are all SSD, are only 50% full, and report healthy. I have fiddled with page file sizes, and am basically running out of things to test.

Different hardware, different applications, different usage...the only thing I see they have in common is Windows.

It may be that there's a new virus or bit of malware out there that isn't being detected by anything yet.

I guess that's possible. Malwarebytes is set up to ignore BI5, but I don't know how much influence the Acronis ATI will have. It tried to stop me writing a Raspi image to a SD card earlier, as it stated the MBR was being altered, so ATI is also keeping a lookout. I do worry when I have two systems that may be doing the same thing, so I think I will disable the ATI anti-malware on LizServer. Trouble is I have to wait for days to find out if it has any affect.
Everything is backed up though !

TimG wrote: ↑Sat Jul 11, 2020 10:37 am
I've been pulling out what's left of my hair trying to figure this out. My Win10 pc's (Used as 24/7 servers) slow down over a few days, and become unresponsive. A reboot sorts it out, but it can take many minutes for the pc to shut down. All pc's have Malwarebytes Premium, and run Acronis True Image 2020 (Which includes anti-ransomware protection). There are no obvious memory leaks or excess cpu usage in Task Manager, and "Reliability History" shows that all is fine. When they slow down, if you click on something, it may react a few minutes later. No weird overheating with fans maxed out either, they just stop doing anything ! Nothing obvious in Events either.

This may be due to the anti-ransomware protection built into Acronis True Image 2020. I remember a encountering a major slow down with Windows 10 on my Blue Iris PC after installing Acronis True Image 2018 with the anti-ransomware protection enabled. My problem was resolved by turning off the anti-ransomware protection in ATI 2018.

I later updated to ATI 2020 with the anti-ransomware protection feature turned off on my Blue Iris PC. There have been no major performance issues with Windows 10. I found the solution on the Acronis True Image forums. Here is one link:

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis ... e-conflict.

Thank you for the info. I will disable it and see if that helps. The pc's do all run Windows Defender as well as MB premium and ATI, so it makes sense.

Lizserver: ATI protection turned OFF at 11:10 UK time 12/7/20. Checked for Windows updates = none. Rebooted pc. Following reboot it looked like it was completing some past major Windows update. Hmm...

Timserver: Oh, I had already turned it off here, and this is the pc that doesn't slow down. I made so many changes, and hoped one of them would sort it out, but then I got overwhelmed by the sheer number of failing computers. It looks like this might be the issue.

Thanks for posting. Now I need to wait a week and see what happens

Still no conclusions to be made, as Windows updates forced multiple reboots. I think it feels better though
If it is this, then I can feel a support email to Acronis coming up. I don't think it will get far though. Last issue with ATI was it changing date and time stamps on previous back ups when it creates a new back up. Since you now can't add in the date and time to the filename, that leaves you only with the sequence number.
Acronis: "That is normal with incremental back ups".
TimG: But these are FULL backups...

Well, I've always had issues with computers slowing down after several days without being turned off at all, I thought it was a normal thing... But yeah, I think it may be linked with piled-up non-installed updates, with a new, yet undetected virus (especially if it's a discreet one that doesn't cause massive issues but just sips from your CPU power to mine bitcoin or something like that for someone else), or with a combination of both.

Yes, I thought it was normal for Windows, but it wasn't. reddawg nailed it with the ATI ransomware protection. The pc is now breezing along, and is working much better. The Reliability history shows it is behaving well too

Next issue: Malwarebytes Premium has decided BlueIris.exe is a problem, and quarantines it on a reboot. Since I am running BI5 as a service, this is invisible. If I don't verify that BI5 is actually running, it probably isn't, because MB has quarantined it again. The work around is to reboot again to allow MB to release the quarantined file, and then to quit MB. Start BI5, then re-start MB

Support request sent to MB

Keep us posted on MB. I've had mixed feelings about it. Generally I like it as a product and its detection capabilities are pretty highly regarded in the industry BUT I had an issue a few years ago that it's Malicious Domain blocking (or whatever they call it) would periodically - but regularly - block my ability to connect to Office 365 email. It gave no indication it was blocking the traffic. I had to do quite a bit of debugging before I figured it out and disabling it allowed email to work.

I'm running BI on an old laptop. It's pretty marginal for the five cameras I'm using, operating at 30%-40% CPU service only and 60%-80% with the GUI. But once I start looking at triggered videos, the CPU starts running at 100% This is bad, because then the software struggles catching up with all the data. I've ordered a new computer.

But there is another situation that is of grave concern. "Windows Update" This sends the computer into the state where BI (service only) never catches up and the update never completes. Again, this will not be the problem with the new computer (At another location I'm running six cameras with this computer https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RN ... UTF8&psc=1)

I believe that the surveillance system is compromised when the update is going on. Is it?