[SOLVED] New system, problem persists: PC "physically" lags in various d/l scenarios (not about bandwidth)

[fegefeuer]

Hi,
I've had this problem for a long time now. Can't remember if it was there before I bought the new SSD a year ago.
I thought it was my old hardware, so I recently replaced/upgraded almost everything in my system (but not the SSD) in the hopes of getting rid of it.
Sadly, the problem persists. :-/

Hardware that I kept from old system:
SilverStone FT02 Case
Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD - SATA (bought a year ago)
3TB SATA HDD for data (7 years old by now)
Noctua NH D-14 SE2011 Cooler
Asus Xonar Essence STX (needs some extra 4pin Power from PSU to work)
SCYTHE Kaze Master Fan Controller (only connected to case fans, not to new MoBo and not to CPU fans)
Plextor DVD Drive
Some 4pin Power Extension Cabling/splitter to Scythe Fan Controller and to Plextor DVD drive.
An old Wifi-router CISCO Linksys (I tested removing this wifi-router and going straight from the modem to MoBo, but did not solve the issue)
The modem I got from my cable-company about a year ago.

New Hardware:
Corsair RMx (2018) 750W
Asus - Prime X470 Pro ATX
MSI Geforce RTX 2060 Gaming Z
Ryzen 7 2700X
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR4-3200Mhz
I replaced the power and data cables for my SSD and HDD with new one's.

The main issues:
I'm on Windows 10. I formatted and made a completely new OS with the new hardware.
I don't know if this is pertinent, but in my old system, the SSD I used and still am using was powered via 4pin Molex to SATA adapter. I now changed it to be powered by a "pure" new SATA power cable.

(1) When I start the Battle-Net Launcher, sometimes when I download one of the games (to SSD), my computer completely lags out. I'm not talking about d/l speeds, I'm talking lagging out as if you have 8fps in a 3D video game. It lags so bad that I have to close the launcher if I want to keep using the computer (browsing, Office software, windows explorer, anything really). Any audio playing also begins to stutter hard.
However, I just tested it again, and it was less bad. It still lagged the computer slightly and made everything feel not smooth, but it was not as bad as yesterday's 8fps. However, when I tried watching a high-res Twitch stream while Battle.Net was downloading, the twitch stream would not work, it would lag out. Once I close the Battle.Net Launcher, the Twitch Stream is smooth again.

(2) When I use Torrent-Software (downloading to data drive, not SSD), I cannot continue watching Twitch on my side monitor. It lags out like in the case above. Again, I'm not talking about d/l lag / bandwidth problems. I'm talking about a weird fps lag like as if a 3D video game runs at 8fps and is completely overwhelming your system. The sound stutter happens here too. Let's say my max available bandwidth is 11mb/s. Even when my torrent downloads at 2mb/s and there should be at least 8mb/s available for the Twitch Stream, the Twitch stream will begin to lag. It's not normal, it should be fluid as long as the torrent does not max out the bandwidth. And even then, it should only cause the stream to buffer, not the whole system to "physically" lag.

I thought all this was caused by some bad parts of my old motherboard just being overwhelmed somehow when just downloading with the battle.net Launcher to my only year-old SSD.
But the problem persists with the new hardware.

Anybody have any idea? I'd be so happy if the system would just run smoothly. I can play games like Dark Souls III perfectly smoothly with the new system at Max settings, and no temp issues at all.
But something is very wrong with downloading things.

 

[fegefeuer]

Update: Blizzard support solved it. It was ZoneAlarm. After uninstalling and restart, issue is gone.
Can't believe a - what I think is widely used - firewall software on a clean format/Win-install can cause such an impactful issue - and that on two very different hardware setups. I don't get how that's possible.

 

[Karadjgne]

Easy. There's many, many programs out there that use a bunch of different names for things in their programming like stuff.exe or twitch.sys etc. Along comes some fly-by-night hacker who starts writing malware/virus code and calls it stuff.sys. You get on battlenet and they try and run stuff.exe that's on your pc and ZoneAlarm heuristics thinks there's a correlation between stuff.exe and stuff.sys and bogs you down like crazy while it scans it for virus code, thinks about if it's trouble, checks the web for updates or known associations etc.

It's happened to every AV out there, from Avast to Panda to Norton or McAfee at some point. They just don't always get along with what your interests are. You'll see many programs will actually advise you to disable any AV that's running before install can begin, simply because it'll use names like install.exe and start.exe etc that are huge red flags to AV programs and will quarantine the install files as you are installing them.

I recently decided to replay Starwars Kotor, so naturally downloaded a bunch of happy mods and some fixes for 1080p widescreen. Forgot to turn off my Norton. Got everything in and done, and nothing. Norton had quarantined half the mods installs and totally messed up the widescreen fix since I had to manually change some hex coding in the.ini file. Norton thought it was a virus attack and put the squash on everything. Irritated would be a mild word for 4 hours wasted. But it was my fault, I knew better.

 

[fegefeuer]

Thank you for the info @Karadjgne and for explaining it in an accessible way.

It's too bad, I had been using ZoneAlarm for over a decade. I loved many things about it: that it would tell me when one program is locally accessing another local program for example and that I could allow/refuse that.

I don't understand how an issue like this slips through quality control. I have standard hardware (Asus, Samsung, etc.) and software (Win10, ZoneAlarm, Battle.Net Launcher) and the software lagged me severely. Why don't they program in routines that analyze how hard the AV is lagging the system and gives the user some feedback: "Hey there, our internal local evaluation script just showed that we ramped up our activities on this PC since like 5 seconds ago and ZoneAlarm is working really hard right now on stuff and slowing your system down. If your computer seems to lag right now, we are the culprit. Just FYI, so you're not in the dark for more than a year."

Sorry to hear about your wasted hours re: Kotor mod installation (and Kotor = bestest game). I can relate now.

 

[Karadjgne]

Heh, yeah, that would be nice, but then again it'd be something that'd warn you 20x a day, and most would find that irritating and disable the warnings. And a month later totally forget what the warnings were about, and are now irritated all over again because they are lagging... Vicious cycle.

I used to have ZoneAlarm years ago, back in the Windows 95 Era. But I have run with Symantec for 20 odd years now and it's not failed me or caused issue. But it's a personal choice for sure. Can't blame it for the quarantines, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, and then reminded me I was an idiot.

 

[fegefeuer]

Heh, yeah, that would be nice, but then again it'd be something that'd warn you 20x a day, and most would find that irritating and disable the warnings. And a month later totally forget what the warnings were about, and are now irritated all over again because they are lagging... Vicious cycle.

I used to have ZoneAlarm years ago, back in the Windows 95 Era. But I have run with Symantec for 20 odd years now and it's not failed me or caused issue. But it's a personal choice for sure. Can't blame it for the quarantines, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, and then reminded me I was an idiot.

Yea, you're right. I certainly complain about warning messages too, so I get that angle. But still, it's strange to me that such a strong lag would not cause any kind of internal/external response. I certainly now know for the future that weird lag or any weird issues could be due to "invasive"/diligent Antivirus components. -It just surprised me how strong that effect can be on performance on a reasonably powerful system.

 

[Karadjgne]

Well when you think about it it's all the same. Back in the days of dial-up, you were looking at 350-400MHz pc's downloading at 4-5k. So a slow (and that was a fast model!) pc trying to read code strings and match them up with known and maybe figured virus strings. Come forwards 20 years and a pc 100x as fast is doing the same thing with code strings that are downloaded 100x as fast, if not faster. And you aren't downloading a simple jpg picture file that took minutes, but whole libraries that are 100x as large and take considerably longer. You might have an impressive rig, but it's workload is pretty comparable in effort, so affects will be pretty commensurate.

If that makes any sense.

 

[fegefeuer]

I was going to PM you instead of necro'ing this thread, but then I read your signature on here

Yes, that does make sense. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this and you did help me get some perspective on this.