FME Workbench 2015.1 high CPU usage when idle

That doesn't look familiar (just doublechecked here and an idle FME Workbench 2015.1.2.1 on Windows 8.1, i5, has exactly 0% processor usage when idle).

One thing that comes to mind is if you have a Shared FME Folder specified on a network share (for custom transformers etc) and it's querying that. But then again, that should finish fairly quickly unless you have a very large collection up there.

It's probably best to contact Safe support (or your local reseller) for this and supply them with the output of the troubleshooting .bat file

Exactly which process is using CPU cycles?

• fmeworkbench.exe?
• fme.exe?
• fmedatainspector.exe?
• other?

David

I'm certainly not seeing this in 2015.1 - opening a workspace takes up to about 8%, but then that drops right back to zero once the workspace is open.

The only thing that occurs to me is that it is trying to fetch content for the start window. It should try and then revert to a fixed page if it can't connect, but something might be going wrong.

Does the start window appear to be updated with new content (right now mine shows an image with "2016 is here"), or is it a fixed page? I wonder if you have a firewall or proxy that it is trying to get around?

Can you use the task manager (or similar) to see if it is responsible for any network traffic or requests?

If it is a networking issue, Tools > Options > Network could be used to sort that out.

Try opening a command prompt and typing this:

netstat -o | find "12345"

...where 12345 is the process ID of workbench obtained from the task manager.

That should - I hope - show what network traffic Workbench is generating. I'm not convinced it is showing everything, but it might show something.

fmeworkbench.exe uses 10-12% cpu immediately after opening a blank workspace. It never goes down - not even when minimized. If I create a minimum workspace - for instance a creator with an inspector and run it, fmeinspector.exe opens and will consume another 10-12% and will remain that way for as long as it's kept open.

The startup window shows "2016 is here." too so I suppose it's being updated.

netstat -o doesn't really show anything useful as far as I can see. Using Network monitor I can see that fmeworbench.exe chats with our FME license server, fmestartup.safe.com, docs.safe.com and a couple of eloqua.com-hosts (webstats?) upon startup (the first 20 seconds or so). It then continues chatting with startup.safe.com for a couple of mintes. After that it's just communication with the license server ever 2 mins. In total only a few hundred frames during my logging period of one hour. CPU usage for the idle fmeworkbench.exe process was at 10-12% constantly. To me it seems unlikely that high network traffic is causing this.

Definately driver related. I had to go back to a late 2014-version of the 5500 driver. Totally worth it to get a quiet laptop again though :)

Interesting. Sounds like it is related to this issue:

https://knowledge.safe.com/articles/19629/workbench-crashes.html

...though in your case it wasn't a crash. From that article yes, it seems an upgrade to your graphics card driver should fix the issue. Our developers say they can't do anything for FME because it's a fault in the driver itself.

I just updated the article to include the information you supplied. Thanks for letting us know.