System Interrupts Huge CPU Usage

Thanks for your reply.

At this point I am open and willing to try anything.

So tonight I have;

Uninstalled the drivers for my SSD.

Tried my SSD in 2 other sata ports including one which is 3gig instead of 6 gig.

Tried setting the HD to IDE instead of AHCI.

No success yet.

I'm considering a repair install of windows next. After that probably a complete reinstall from scratch. So incredibly frustrating!

setup:

I had this problem,too. It occured after changing the CPU cooler and the PSU in my desktop computer. In the process I had to completely remove the Mobo and subsequently all cables. The system had been running perfectly fine before. After the hardware update the system interrupts took up 7-10 % of my 8-core AMD CPU.

trials:

After reading this had to do with failing hardware, especially HDD-controllers, I tried all of my 7 drives (including 2 optical drives), starting the system with only one drive enabled, then two and so on. It came down to two SATA HDDs causing the issue. If any of those two was plugged in, I got the system interrupts' CPU usage. 

solution:

Taking a wild guess, I re-arranged all SATA cables on the Mobo. Sounds stupid, because it is. But it worked.

Can I first thank you sincerely for such a detailed and thorough reply.

I will bore anyone reading with the details in case it is useful for someone else some day; System Interrupt on my machine is using on average 40% CPU. Very high!

Since my post this morning I had time to start all over again with Andre's original method for pin-pointing what was responsible for the 'System Interrupt'. I can't say what it is I did differently this time, but clearly I got something wrong as this time it worked perfectly and I was able to see the following with high latency;

ataport.SYS (Count 15,781,685)

HDAudBus.SYS (Count 7,884,627)

hal.dll (Count: 303,937)

dxgkrnl.sys (Count: 22,275)

USBPORT.SYS (Count 56,137)

ACPI.sys (Count 43)

Clearly the ataport.SYS module is having the greatest affect, sorry but as yet I haven't identified what it means or what the remedy is but I will be back to report when I do.

Also for reference for other people, my mobo is an Asus P8P67-M.

Radeon R7 Series Graphics Card

(was at one point also running a GeForce card too with three monitors hooked up but have since removed to see if it was causing the issue).

16GB RAM across 3 sticks.

Win 7 Enterprise.

Dan,

I used a piece of software called Process Explorer to find my high interrupt usage.  It's a freebie and is safe to use. 

I found out that you can't see the interrupts usage in Windows' standard task manager even if you select "all processes" on the usage tab.  Process Explorer, however, will show all the "hidden" processes, including your interrupts.  On Windows XP, it's just called "interrupts" in Process Explorer, I've never seen "DLC_Interrupts" before, so that nomenclature is new to me, but is possibly in use in Win7 or higher. 

Seems like there may be several solutions to high interrupt usage, but most of them lean toward replacing a driver for some piece of hardware.  In the grand scheme of things, that makes perfect sense, since interrupts are dictated by how many devices are attached to your motherboard and the demands made by the drivers for each of them.  The new Windows architecture uses more than the standard 15 interrupts of old, namely because there are way more devices than that now on any given motherboard.  So the OS is managing the standrad 15 interrupts and sharing them with all your devices, which requires drivers that act as interpreters, which can lead to conflicts, which drives up interrupt usage when a driver is corrupt and can't "interpret" correctly for the given device affected. 

In my experience, a corrupt driver for a serious piece of hardware is causing this problem, like a hard drive, network card or video card, high interrupt usage is usually indicative of a corrupt driver in some high use device like any of the three I mentioned.  Something is struggling to balance itself out with system resources, and a corrupt hardware driver is probably the culprit. 

To re-install drivers for the hard drives, use Windows Device Manager to remove the disk drives from you system (try one at a time) and reboot.  Windows should reinstall the drivers on it's own from the CAB pool of drivers already on your PC.  As for video and sound, NIC, etc.  make sure you have your drivers on hand for re-install when attempting to reload.  Go through each system hardware device one-at-a-time, remove the device, reboot and reinstall the drivers, until your interrupt usage quiets down to a nice 0% to 2% usage with a normal desktop with no other software running.  I'd try the hard drives first, they are the easiest to get back up and running, since Windows already has the drivers for them.  I was nervous, doing this myself for the first time, since I've never uninstalled disk drive drivers before, but it did solve my problem.  

Good luck! - radiocowboy10