Windows seems to hang sometimes for 300-600ms - measured by Performance Counter

Question

Anyone know how to avoid that Windows 7 sometimes pauses for 300-600ms, even freezing SystemTime and MultimediaTimer (so if you measure time before and after this pause, it measures 0ms while PerformanceCounter in fact does measure this pause correctly. CPU load is pretty low (10%). The system uses a new MLC SSD. Do these still have stutter issues?

I found this behaviour by measuring timestamps from a camera grapping at 6 frames per second. I logged when images came in, and looking at the grapping log, the time between the images were fine, until I warned if the time between them was 20% too fast and 20% too slow. Then I sometimes (once per hour, sometimes only after 4 hours) got 300-600ms warnings. Followed by some "too fast" (image buffer suddenly give images from the buffer that built up during the 300-600ms pauses in a burst). However, the times in the log entries show that the systemtime wasnt updated during this time.

Log timestamps are given by GetLocalTime(LPSYSTEMTIME), and the time between images grapped are given by PerformanceCounter. When I use multimediatimer for to measure the time between new images , its time duration is the same as you get when subtracting the times in the log. Then I thought it was weird that it gave me extra images with 0-30ms time difference.

I tried all kinds of tweaks and driver updates in the network interface, different cameras, to no luck.

166ms is the ideal time between images , but here is an example of "bursts" of missing time slots and discrepancy between systemtime and performancecounter:

[03:06:09:48:22:615]New Image
[03:06:09:48:22:781]New Image
[03:06:09:48:22:949]New Image
[03:06:09:48:22:974]New Image. Warning Time since last: 224ms
[03:06:09:48:23:083]New Image
[03:06:09:48:23:238]New Image. Warning Time since last: 454ms
[03:06:09:48:23:261]New Image. Warning Time since last: 224ms
[03:06:09:48:23:415]New Image. Warning Time since last: 353ms
[03:06:09:48:23:551]New Image
[03:06:09:48:23:583]New Image. Warning Time since last: 330ms
[03:06:09:48:23:734]New Image. Warning Time since last: 451ms
[03:06:09:48:23:754]New Image. Warning Time since last: 119ms
[03:06:09:48:23:854]New Image
[03:06:09:48:24:020]New Image
[03:06:09:48:24:186]New Image
[03:06:09:48:24:354]New Image
[03:06:09:48:24:520]New Image
[03:06:09:48:24:686]New Image

So it all comes down to this question:

• What phenomenon can cause the systemtime and multimedia time to lock up with the rest of the system so the pause is masked in the timings, while performance counter still keeps time, and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

I fixed this by installing a new networks driver, disabling hyperthreading, turbo boost and CPU Pstates.