Friday, December 20, 2013

Skype - Ultra High CPU Usage

The past few days I've noticed that my office laptops Skype was permanently sitting at +- 90%+ CPU usage. Since I use Skype for work, not using it was not exactly a viable option, and restarting it (And updating to the latest version) didn't help.

I did, however - Find a solution!

1.) Download Process Explorer
2.) Run it
3.) Right click on Skype, and click "Properties"
4.) Click "Threads" (Ignore the potential message about something not being up to date)
5.) Sort by CPU usage by clicking the 2nd tab from the left twice.
6.) Find that a single thread is using all the CPU (For me it was Skype.exe+0x705c although it's also known to be Skype.exe+0x7074)
7.) Click the offending thread, and click  "Kill"

Skype's CPU usage will drop to what it's meant to be (0% average for me), with no visible side effects.

Seems like Microsoft have some threading bug with Skype that's existed for awhile :)

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