Anyone have experience using Procmon for Windows?

[irpacynot]

Been having terrible issues (10-30 sec freeze-ups constantly occurring when trying to mix) here in the past few weeks when using Waveform 12, and after some digging, I found a suggestion that it could be due to Waveform getting overloaded with scanning for plugins.

There was a suggestion that Procmon could be used to suss out and correct issues. I downloaded it, but I've never used it.

[jabe]

I've used it quite a lot, though not recently. Also used other Sysinternals software.

You might want to start with ProcExp because it shows the usage and various dependencies. Might make it more obvious where the hold-up is happening. Sysinternals software usually has filters so you don't see stuff you're not interested in.

[JsinOwl]

I've used ProcMon a ton, very useful, but I haven't used it for anything like what you need. I use it to find out what's writing to disk and stamp those processes out if possible to extend SSD life. In the end, for all my effort, I'll probably extend its life by a whopping 20 minutes, but it makes me feel better. lol

[irpacynot]

Hmm...

Well first, thank you both for responding. I've never used this sort of utility before.

Um, when I extracted the zip file, it shows me three forms of the software: Procmon, Promon64 and Procmon64a. Not sure which one to start with. I'm using Window 11 on a Dell i7-12700k (3.60 GHz) 32 GB RAM, if any of that helps.

[jabe]

Doesn't matter much which you use. Use the 64 one. It won't hurt anything. Just run it and watch what happens. Have a bit of a play. Not sure about the 64a one... might be for AMD processors, but that's just a guess. ProcMon is probably for anyone still running a 32-bit processor. Have a play with filtering what it shows you. You will find that millions of messages come very quickly, but you can pause it or restart it from within to help get rid of stuff you're not interested in.

Do you use Task Manager? I tend to have it running all the time, acting like a sort of speedometer. You could use it as a starting point. If you can, arrange a set of actions that always or almost always cause the problem, then look on Task Manager to see what's hogging the machine's resources. Hopefully it'll point you in the right direction.

This is one of the sites I have open pretty much all the time I'm awake, so I'll be here or hereabouts for more help. That said, I don't know why it took me six days to see your post!

[irpacynot]

Doesn't matter much which you use. Use the 64 one. It won't hurt anything. Just run it and watch what happens. Have a bit of a play. Not sure about the 64a one... might be for AMD processors, but that's just a guess. ProcMon is probably for anyone still running a 32-bit processor. Have a play with filtering what it shows you. You will find that millions of messages come very quickly, but you can pause it or restart it from within to help get rid of stuff you're not interested in.

Do you use Task Manager? I tend to have it running all the time, acting like a sort of speedometer. You could use it as a starting point. If you can, arrange a set of actions that always or almost always cause the problem, then look on Task Manager to see what's hogging the machine's resources. Hopefully it'll point you in the right direction.

This is one of the sites I have open pretty much all the time I'm awake, so I'll be here or hereabouts for more help. That said, I don't know why it took me six days to see your post!

Oh yeah, I have task manager pinned to the taskbar. But here's the thing, when Waveform is hiccuping like that (sometimes up to 30-second long), the resources are fine. Memory rarely ever gets up to 25%, and CPU almost never goes above 5%, if that.

[jabe]

Good. Perhaps ProcMon or ProcExp will help.

[Peter Widdicombe]

Just curious - was it just the GUI affected, or did audio hiccup as well?

I had the video freezing but audio playing normally; and to fix, adjusted display settings to use the software renderer rather than the Direct2D option. Also interesting is that it DEFAULTED blank (none set). I didn't have that on my secondary machine, but it's a desktop with only one monitor.