DisplayFusion uses between 20% an 40% of my CPU

i second this also having abnormally high CPU usage on windows 10 19042.1110

What helped in my case was to disable the dual monitor task bar and enable Windows' 10 natives one.

I have sent in traces from ProcMon in the past, showing eggregious amounts of calls, most of them unnecessary.

Owen, if you want to see why BF's apps are consuming CPU, using ProcMon (part of SysInternals) is the first place to start.

Hey I am having the same issues for a while now. If I turn off the multi-monitor taskbar for DF and just use the windows one, DF behaves and only chews up a little bit of resources. If I turn it on, DF is easily at 15%-35% of CPU. I like the product and especially the taskbars but it's too costly at that resource price. I have been a user for a long time and I only remember seeing this for the last 8-10 months or so. Any suggestions before I turn it off?

I believe there is a setting that will reduce the frequency by which DF refreshes its task bars (Taskbar Polling Interval IIRC). This may help some with the CPU usage. But it is a bandaid, not a real fix of the application's perf issues.

Attached. Let me know if you need other files or more information. Thanks.

Same thing is happening to me. Had to disable multi monitor rtaskbar to stop it. Troubleshooting info attached.

So after a bunch of testing and some personal delays...some of those things are already off and I tested the rest. It's pretty much the Multi-Montitor Taskbars...with that off...normal CPU usage...with that on, it blows up.
Something is going on there that really spikes usage.
Hope this helps.

Owen, sorry again for the long delay. However, after pretty extensive testing...if I turn on the Multi-Monitor Taskbar it sends cpu usage into high demand (easily 20-40%) and if I keep it off it stays pretty low (in context) in the 1-4% area. From looking through the discussions for a while, this does not seem to be isolated to me, nor a new issue. Since your last message to me, other than when testing, I am running with this feature off...otherwise it's too costly (CPU-wise). Please let me know what you have discovered or any news about a refactoring of this feature, because for now, it's unusable at that level of resource hogging.

Thanks.

--Jeff

On Windows 11 Pro, 21H2, Build 22000.318. I also had high CPU usage and can confirm that turning Multi Monitor Taskbars off lowers it back to normal.

Same issue. DisplayFusion runs fine for a while and then it would just randomly start to use heaps of CPU.

I'm not using any displayfusion desktop wallpaper, no automatically pick accent colour in windows setting. I only have displayfusion taskbar enabled and it'll eat up around 40%~50% of my CPU. If I disable displayfusion taskbar setting, it'll run fine.

Running Win10 21H2.
Running latest DisplayFusion beta build.

Looks like issue is related to this thread from 2 years ago. Not sure why this issue hasn't been fixed for such a long time....
https://www.displayfusion.com/Discussions/View/displayfusion-and-windows-10-1903-constant-cpu-usage/?ID=e706203b-0af1-4bc5-a336-b77f48be2253

Also, I've noticed that my Windows Explorer is so much more responsive now with the DF taskbar disabled. Right click on folders, opening new instances of Windows Explorer etc feels super snappy now. Why is DF performing so poorly when the taskbar setting is enabled

I STRONGLY suggest that BF developers run ProcessExplorer and trap all activity created by all DF processes. It is just egregious, and if they are like every single client I have consulted with over the last 2+ decades, they don't actually know all the calls that are being made under the covers.

Application tuning is truly simple at its core: monitor the entire app (under a wide variety of operating states/conditions), aggregate findings to identify exceptional and total-slowness-inducing activities, eliminate the worst, lather-rinse-repeat. Given modern development capabilities, this process can be done by a dedicated staff/group concurrently with the normal feature/bug-fix branches. Come on BF - lets get this done!!

Having same issue was eating up 30% of a AMD 5600X.

Exact same issue here, DF "idling" at about 12-14% CPU usage with multi monitor taskbar on, if I turn it off it drops to 2% or less.

I really like the individual taskbar, and it is one of the main features I use in DF, but having it use so much CPU for what is more or less a static overlay is a high price to pay.

I don't know if I have mentioned it on this thread or not, but one way to work around this issue - until BF fix it correctly - is to set a fairly high Taskbar Polling Interval. You can find this in Advanced Settings. I have mine currently set to 12000, which means the DF Taskbars only update once every 12 seconds.

But I will again say that the amount of CPU/disk activity that the various DF processes are doing per unit time is just INSANE. Fix that and we all win. The product is UNUSABLE out of the box if you are on battery power, and when plugged in you NOTICE the load the "utility application" places on your computer, which is absolutely unacceptable.

Sysinternals ProcessMonitor will allow you to capture the extraordinary volume of calls being made.

I am having this problem too. I don't have anything to add that others haven't already said.

Having same issue with high CPU and with older version 9.9 with Windows 11 latest version. Disabling the multi-monitor DF taskbars definitely drops the high CPU cycles and this was also an issue with the Beta V10 which I tried. I do also run Start11. Attached is the log as requested and local time +8hrs is 1.24pm. I had disabled the DF multi taskbar and then reactivated with the log active and spike was 20-30%. I have 11900K with 64GB ram. It is very erratic behavior as I just reenabled the DF MT and CPU is like 0.1% but I do expect that over time it will increase as I have previously experienced.

Can I use the beta if I bought DF via steam?
The high CPU usage is the reason I don't run DF normally.

I'm on windows 11 and was using version 9.9 experiencing this exact issue. I upgraded to the beta 10 as suggested. It helps, but does not solve the issue. I have gone from DF using about 10% CPU usage to around 5%. But disabling the multi monitor taskbar setting brings it back down to a negligible 0-.01%

It was occuring when I turned on the minimal log, and continued to until I exported it.

I was on 9.9 and now jumped to 10.0 beta 11 and the CPU hovered between 30 and 50% for both versions and this further on 2 different Win 10 systems. Upon disabling the multi-monitor taskbar, I am down to 1-3%.

As an update, the lack of multi-monitor taskbar started biting, so I tried other suggestions in various discussions. Disabling System Hooks (applications) in Advanced Settings did not help. However, Disabling all the System Hooks, applications, polling and shell helped. Most interesting, enabling all the System Hooks back did not bring back the high CPU. The latter seems to be gone and does not come back even after a reboot. There seems to be something irreversible and good happening when temporarily disabling all the System Hooks.

Did you also try increasing the polling interval? That should cut CPU use as well. But it is definitely just a bandaid. BF still needs to GREATLY improve the efficiency of their application!

Sorry I switched to the Beta 10 Build 11 and seems much better.

Add me to the list of people experiencing this. After a reboot, my computer is fine for days or weeks. Then this high CPU thing happens, and so far, my only fix is a reboot of the system. Then I get a few days/weeks. Very frustrating. Has been happening for years. When it happens, everything on the computer is sluggish even if free CPU. Explorer, Outlook, etc all basically become unsuable.

Running Pro 9.9 on Windows 10 Enterprise - 21H2

Willing to debug if it gets this resolved.

So I have another computer that is running DiplayFusion Pro 9.9, where I did not do any Hooks Disabling. DisplayFusion has been recently running there at 30% CPU even though no extra monitor was connected and not much activity of any sort was taking place there otherwise. With the polling interval, the issue there is that you have no scale provided - you do not know what the default value is. In any case, I tried to set to something reasonable and for values 10-100ms, the DisplayFusion CPU went down to 13% or so, still unacceptable.

Interestingly, once I wiped out my setting modification, i.e., went back to some default, DisplayFusion stayed at that 13% or so CPU. I.e., obviously there is something irreversible happening there, even if tentatively. Only switching on and off of Multimonitor Taskbar leads to reversible changes.

Why do you feel that DF needs to check on EVERYTHING every 100ms?? I certainly don't. I have mine set for 12000 ms, which just means I need to wait sometimes for a new app to appear on all task bars. Even with this excessively long time all of DF's processes combined still average about 2% CPU on a reasonably powerful laptop.

I think that ALL users who are having CPU issues should download ProcessMonitor (Free Sysinternals tool), set it to trap ALL DF processes, and let it run for 5 minutes and dump the file to Binary Fortress. You will be absolutely blown away by all the calls that are done by their code!! It is trivial to do, and I have recommended it to them countless times, so it is just really frustrating to me that they haven't addressed the issues yet.

Well, I next set the polling to 1000ms and then to 10000ms and it does not really matter - DisplayFusion runs at 18% CPU now on that particular computer that only has its native screen running.

OK, here you go. Attached is an unprotected ProcessMonitor capture of all of DisplayFusion* processes on my laptop. I ran the trace this afternoon from 15:46:52.6 - 15:48:25.09, so about 93 seconds. DF processes did 100936(!!!!!) registry and file operations, and this amount was FOURTEEN PERCENT of ALL such activity during that time!! And I have a LOT of stuff running on my laptop! Think about that for a second. ONE APPLICATION did 14% of all registry and file operations on a windows computer. Heck, I had well over 50 tabs open in 2 browsers, SQL Server, VMWare running a virtual machine, etc,etc. Note that their app is doing over 1000 registry/file operations PER SECOND!

You can get procmon from Microsoft's SysInternals (awesome collection if you aren't aware of it!!).

Look at how many times this set of calls is made:

RegQueryKey HKLM Query: HandleTags, HandleTags: 0x0 SUCCESS 10932
RegOpenKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace Desired Access: Query Value SUCCESS 10932
RegQueryValue HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\ValidateRegItems Length: 16 NAME NOT FOUND 10932
RegCloseKey HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace SUCCESS 10932
RegQueryKey HKLM Query: HandleTags, HandleTags: 0x0 SUCCESS 10932
RegOpenKey HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace Desired Access: Query Value SUCCESS 10932
RegQueryValue HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\MonitorRegistry Type: REG_DWORD, Length: 4, Data: 1 SUCCESS 10932
RegCloseKey HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace SUCCESS 10932

Look at how many times EVERY CONFIGURATION for EVERY PROFILE is iterated (70-100ish calls per profile):
RegQueryValue HKCU\SOFTWARE\Binary Fortress Software\DisplayFusion\MonitorProfiles\...

This is utterly egregious code behavior!! Every time I have shown clients stuff like this their devs had no earthly idea what their code was doing. Whether BF's devs do or not is not material. What IS material is that they STOP ASKING FOR THE SAME DATA SO FREQUENTLY!!! POOOOFFF! Performance problem solved. Well, at least this completely unnecessary part of it. I don't know what else their code is doing that can be shaved without affecting operational integrity.

Right off the bat - don't tie installation for current/all users to the placement of an icon on the desktop, which is how the installer is currently configured.

1) Installation "hung" near the end for almost a full minute before it completed.

2) Opening Settings consumed a full core for about 15 seconds. This is repeatable. That is quite silly. Profile what it is doing and make it stop.

3) DisplayFusion.exe is consuming significantly more CPU on my laptop that prior build. Averaging about 5%. Before it was 1-2%.

4) OK, this build is official horrible. You are infinitely looping over every registry entry for these these items:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MMDevices\Audio\Render\*

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\*

I don't think those were even in the ProcMon file I sent yesterday. Your app is now doing SIXTY TWO PERCENT OF ALL REGISTRY/FILE OPERATIONS ON MY LAPTOP!!! That is up from an already staggering 14% yesterday!

Back to the drawing board! I sure hope I can downgrade to an older build!

I just downloaded 9.9 installer to put that back on my laptop, and I noticed that the 10.x beta you just released is 23.2MB larger. That seems like a HUGE increase in file size (25%ish). I am curious - what's the story there? Windows 11 crap maybe??

DF Pro 10.0 Build 12 toggles between 2% and 22% CPU, most often 7-8% and at times 45%. Again, this is on a computer that currently has no secondary monitor attached. Interestingly, the comments on the built make no reference to any different handling of the taskbar.

Install notes specify
v10.0 (Beta 12) • February 8, 2022
Change: Installer bundles 64-bit C++ runtime now, size increased by ~20 MB

Also to note, my install went fine.

When I reinstalled DF 9.9, when the app spun up for the first time it stated that the Windows multi monitor toolbar was in effect and did I want to disable it. I note that the 10.x beta did NOT tell me that when I installed it, and I didn't have it on prior, but after uninstallation WMMT was on. Curious, and I also do not know if that would have affected how the app was performing.

Because updating with settings intact and installing for the "first" time, DisplayFusion has different set up parameters.

Just updated to the latest beta, with all the settings back to where they were before (mainly with multi-taskbars on) and CPU is currently at 1.5-3%. Will update if that changes.

Thank you for continuing to look in to what changed and trying to figure it out. I'm not gonna berrate you with inane questions.

the Just to make clear, I see no qualitative improvement regarding the excessive CPU in the new beta compared to old - it just got a bit bizarre in jumping between low and very high CPU in circles. From other contexts I know that such jumping can take additional toll on the system, not reflected in instantaneous CPU.

Me too only WIN7x64, beta 12 takes explorer.exe to 100% and locks everything up until I kill it.

Where is beta11 download? There really needs to be at least a couple prior beta downloads easily accessible for when a bad beta update runs, so we can roll back.

In my case the high CPU usage is caused by WinSCP program. I have version 9.9 with multi monitor taskbar enabled. It doesn't matter if the WinSCP is on the Windows taskbar or DF taskbar. Every open window adds about 14% CPU usage.

Running Beta 12 on Win 11 10.0.22000 Build 22000 I'm getting 0% CPU usage and 21.5MB memory usage currently with 16 programs running on taskbar. I was getting much higher before so huge improvement for me.

Getting constant 20% - 25% CPU usage having 9.9 open (two entire cores!). Causes video games to stutter every second - half second unless I exit the process. Will try the v10 beta

Sure, feel free to send me an email

I also observed it, but I seem to get a significantly lower usage after updating Win 11 to build 22557.1 from the Dev Ring. Now it hovers around the expected 1-2%.

Hello,
I have tried the latest beta, no change. For every WinSCP window open, the CPU usage is getting higher. In the release notes for beta you have that you changed something while copying files. In my case I don't have to do anything, I will just open WinSCP and the CPU usage goes up.

Same here, 10.0 Beta 13 hovering around 30%. I quickly retreated to 9.7 which hovers around 10%, not great, but at least you can work.

I second 4th about the registry queries, there is an absurd amount of RegQueries and RegEnumValues going on even in beta 13. Not just the MMDevices but also TCP-parameters and more. After a minute of logging I have around 5 million queries to all different things.

I told them about this well before I posted on this page too. It is truly egregious that this isn't fixed, because all you have to do is STOP SPAMMING THE REGISTRY AND FILE SYSTEM FOR DATA YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY NEED!!

BF: Can you PLEASE tell us WHY that isn't completed by now, or even partially completed??

Actually, I want to ask a different question: do you INTEND to fix that problem? Because if the answer is no then I feel that you cannot possibly get the software to an acceptable level of performance. I will also just stop using the product knowing that it will never truly be what I need it to be.

I feel like an answer to why DF needs to poll these seemingly arbitrary registry values so unreasonable often would be really nice.

If this is indicative of the overall code quality of the product, I will have to stop my use of it and look elsewhere for a solution, it is extremely excessive.

I am starting to figure out where all my gaming microstutters actually comes from. I was even suddenly banned in Battlefield 2042 (after 2 hours of game time) for code injections/application hooks so now I'm worried that was because of DF.

This seems to work. CPU usage remains the same with three instances of WinSCP open.

Hi, as EA doesn't give out any ban details that is just purely speculation from my side. At the moment of the ban I couldn't find or think of any other process/software that does the hooking while not being so widespread. Using Process Explorer the only hooks I could see against the BF2042.exe process was DF, Nvidia and Logitech stuff.

For now I've uninstalled DF as the monitor profiles doesn't work (other forum thread) and I also want to evaluate if the microstutters I've been getting in games is caused by the polling or something else in DF. I wouldn't say that I've seen a high CPU Usage from DF, it usually hovers around 1-2% so I'm just speculating here as well.

I just uploaded a dump file for DF 10.0 Build 15 hovering at around 50% CPU on Win 10 Pro. On another system, Win 10 Enterprise, the same build has been doing 65% CPU. This is pretty unbelievable. How on Earth can one write such a bad software??! After the issue has been discussed over several builds, it just gets worse.

I first tried lowering the priority of the DisplayFusion task, but then instead limited it to one CPU:

Task Manager Details tab
right-click DisplayFusion.exe
select "Set Affinity"
choose a single CPU

It's been sitting at 20% which is manageable... for now.

Update 16 definitely has lower CPU usage overall @Keith. But certain games definitely seem to be lagging more than 9.9

It still seems why too high to me (beta 16). I'm running 2.5-4.3% with three monitors that have five total virtual monitors. This is on a 5600X Ryzen processor. Windows build 22000.675.0.
It is for sure better than some of the 20-40% numbers I saw in earlier builds, so solid improvements have been made, but I'd hope you would work to get it down to < 1% on a modern processor, similar to other background processes. Slack for example is almost always 0% with UI up and available on demand. Chrome is generally < .5% with a window with multiple tabs up.
I'm not sure what it's doing to need so much processing power while the UI is not even up and I would think the screens are static once set.

Turning off the multi monitor taskbar drops CPU usage to .2 to .5%.

That's one of the main features I like though. Will leave it on for now and hopefully you guys can drop it down a little more.

Thanks,

Beta 16 went down for me to 5% which is far more tolerable, but Actual Window Monitor runs under analogous circumstances at 0.5%. With AWM the problems for me were in the system choking up when a monitor was being added. However, adding or removing monitor are singular instances while the high CPU is always there, crippling all work.

Propnight was pretty unplayable (its on steam). I had to revert update 16 because of it.

I'm on Windows 11 and definitely high CPU usage. I'm on 10.0 (Beta 6). With taskbars disabled it can run 2-5% but with it enabled it is easily 20% slowing down my computer. Is this normal? Even 2-5% seems high.

@Michael
Beta 11 or so was a big drop in CPU use adn helped a great deal with this issue. I think they are on beta 16 or so now. I would advise you upgrade. There is still work to do, but it's much better than it was before.

Oops I am on Beta 16 i guess i will try 11.

Oh bummer. It may help, but I've personally seen a pretty consistant 2-5% use (vs 20-40%) from 11 through the current version So not sure going back will do much good.

Same problem here. my computer was so sluggish as to be almost disabled. Turned off the multi monitor TB and now DF is not longer eating 20% or more CPU

This sounds very encouraging. Hopefully we will get Beta 17 shortly.

It provided some improvement on Windows 11x64. However, on my primary system running Windows 10x64 Pro, it was worse than Beta 16. Its CPU usage was 2.5 to 4.5 consistently
I dropped back to V9.9 and the DF CPU useage dropped back to less than 1.0%

Owen, by now I gave up on DisplayFusion. The problems with AWM appeared when attaching extra monitor, but the problem with DF is there all the time. Yes, AWM team does not respond to customers filing problem reports, while DF team does, but this makes no difference whatsoever in practice. I cannot have computers overheating and all work impaired because of a monitor manager. It makes no sense whatsoever. It is hard to have confidence in a team that cannot fix the problem for close to a year by now. I may come back if this gets ever stabilized, but, for now all my DF installations are inactive.

There's definitely an improvement. Previous version CPU usage would be 5% minimum, now it's in the range of 1.5% to 5%, with occasional spikes to 5.5%ish. Average is probably 3% max.

Win 10 x64, i5-4670, 8GB RAM.

Any chance we could get a link to the new thread here? Google finds this one first. Thanks

v10.1 beta 6 also brought my CPU usage down from 5-10% to 1-3% (with all hooks disabled)

Not sure how it'll turn out in the future, but currently, this seems to have really, really undone the CPU hogging for me! From something like 20+ (Classic Task Manager) to 3-9! Mostly just 3-5 actually... If this proves to be a long-term fix, then that just really saves my neck tbh.