Internet Explorer can still bring the computer to a crawl! [NOT ACCEPTED AS BUG]

[Coldblackice]

(This has been possible for years now)

If you have a few a lot of Internet Explorer tabs open, perhaps nearing ~100+, the machine will start to hang and freeze. As you're opening tabs, you know you're about halfway to this happening when you're scrolling a webpage with the mouse wheel and it suddenly stops scrolling despite the mouse wheel still moving and then beeps start playing from the motherboard system-speaker (which is the *only* time I ever hear those kind of beeps). It's like the machine can't keep up fast enough, so it beeps to say "Overloaded!!".

This *only* happens with IE, no other browsers or programs. In other browsers, I frequently load up hundreds of tabs, and sometimes to the point of even crashing the program (and the 16GB+ of memory it's using) -- however, this *never* affects the rest of the machine.

When you open a lot of IE tabs, system-wide use begins to freeze. The mouse cursor gets severely delayed and choppy. Even Windows GUI windows painting and refreshing gets slowed to a crawl: you can literally see Windows repainting on the screen (in all programs, no just IE). Mouse clicks lag 15-30 seconds behind.

When this is happening, Task Manager shows that IE doesn't appear to be taking a lot of CPU (across the 10-15 iexplore.exe's open), so it's not like it's killing the CPU. Likewise, they're not using up the entire system's memory, either. Nevertheless, it takes 5-10 minutes to slowly script out mouse movements and keypresses to force-close the IE programs -- as soon as they close, the system immediately resumes "breathing" again and functioning at normal speed.


Any idea what's going on here? Process Lasso doesn't do anything to quell this (probably because IE isn't dominating CPU usage), and PL reports full system responsiveness.

How can I find what's causing a *system*-wide freeze/lag/stutter like this with a program?

It makes me wonder if IE is somehow specially attached into the OS, or perhaps if the OS gives IE some preferential privilege to system resources, thus enabling it to bring the system to a crawl.

Now that I'm thinking about it, when this happens, the experience is nearly *exactly* like when CPU Eater is active! However, CPU isn't getting crushed in this case.

[BenYeeHua]

Not sure, but my friend got this too, I saw it freeze when I just open IE...

I think it is caused by many I/O is transferring between processes , then the Anti-virus can't handle it at a short time, and freeze the computer until it is finish scanning.

Or it is caused by hardware acceleration, the IE is biting too much GPU memory?

[Jeremy Collake]

Well, remember that ProBalance will, by default, not act on the foreground process, so you may want to try unchecking 'Ignore foreground process' in the ProBalance settings. Same for 'Ignore children of the foreground process'. However, I'm not sure that will help. This does sound curious, and could be some blocking security check in IE attached to Windows Defender that is having trouble keeping up... or any number of other possibilities, really hard to guess.

[BenYeeHua]

Hmm, maybe SmartScreen? As SmartScreen is enabled even you has Windows Defender disabled(if you installed other AV).

[Jeremy Collake]

Could be. It is a blocking function.

[Coldblackice]

Well, remember that ProBalance will, by default, not act on the foreground process, so you may want to try unchecking 'Ignore foreground process' in the ProBalance settings. Same for 'Ignore children of the foreground process'. However, I'm not sure that will help. This does sound curious, and could be some blocking security check in IE attached to Windows Defender that is having trouble keeping up... or any number of other possibilities, really hard to guess.

Ah, good points. I'll try those and see if it helps anything, especially the child processes one -- I didn't realize that child processes don't get balanced by default.

How could I diagnose or determine if it's what you mentioned about security check w/ Windows Defender?

Hmm, maybe SmartScreen? As SmartScreen is enabled even you has Windows Defender disabled(if you installed other AV).

I always disable SmartScreen. Is it possible it's still somehow enabled though? How could I tell? As for AV, I use Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes on Windows 7.

Could be. It is a blocking function.

What's a blocking function? How can I try further diagnosing this? It happens without fail, every time. There's a tipping-point of open tabs that suddenly brings the computer to an unusable crawl -- until I can force-close IE (if I can even do that, it's so slow and unresponsive).

[BenYeeHua]

I think you need Windows Performance Toolkit(WPT) to record and check why IE hang, and it is a bit hard to use if you using it as first time.

[Coldblackice]

I think you need Windows Performance Toolkit(WPT) to record and check why IE hang, and it is a bit hard to use if you using it as first time.

Maybe this will help shed some light on the issue, as it seems to be a deeper system issue than iexplore.exe --

What can cause the system beeps to play?

Like where the system is so overloaded, it plays system beeps until it resumes and everything unfreezes again. It seems to be lower-level than a running .exe

[BenYeeHua]

GPU hardware acceleration? DPC latency?
When the beeps happen, I think it means the interrupt to the system are not getting respond.

Maybe try the LatencyMon first?