Don't use Piriform Speccy!

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by Keatah, Sep 23, 2013.

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  1. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    A colleague of mine d'l the latest version of Speccy from Piriform and discovered that it hammers your main disk big time. If you simply start the program and let it sit, it builds up a monster-sized log full of useless and repetitive information. It increases by a few KB every second and shows no sign of stopping till you exit the program.

    He said that the log can grow to hundreds of megabytes overnight! Imagine that! The more disks you have in your system, the worse it is. He said that one or two disks isn't that bad. You'll get a 50-100 meg file. But 6 disks like he has and whoaaa!!! 800megs!!! Additionally he said something about it erasing and re-creating another windows log file over and over again. While I don't know all the details I can tell you this isn't good for SSD.

    I don't know why more and more previously working programs (speccy never had this problem before) are now being broken. This seems to happen when developers are making changes just to make them and especially when they are groping for ideas to justify their very existence. Folks, there comes a time when a piece of software IS FINISHED and needs no further updates.

    This seems to be a disturbing trend that is only accelerating. Across many companies. And Piriform is not and exception in the least.

    ~Phrase removed~When something is working good, STOP BREAKING IT!
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 23, 2013
  2. SweX

    SweX Registered Member

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    I don't use Speccy at the moment. But to me it sounds like he enabled some kind of logging function in the program, if it has one. :doubt:
     
  3. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    My own kwik-n-dirty investigation into the matter says that's exactly right.

    Speccy is pounding the disks with a SMART request every second. And then recording a success or fail. Something like that. This is default behavior and I see no option to turn it off or change the interval.

    An older system of mine with 2 disks made a 1MB text file in 14 minutes. At the end of the night I could reasonably expect to see a 40-50 MB text file with repetitive (non important) information.
     
  4. Robin A.

    Robin A. Registered Member

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    And the CPU it uses increases permanently, which shouldn´t happen if it simply took a "snapshot" of the system status.
     
  5. Ashanta

    Ashanta Registered Member

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  6. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    I should contact them and write something up, again, I briefly commented on this before but more or less forgotten about it till now. I'll let my colleague do that. But I'm ~Snip~ as it is. No make that~Snip~! This time it's a wholly unrelated CCleaner issue that cropped up.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 23, 2013
  7. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    Oh yeh I never thought to pay attention to that. On one of my ancient old systems I see about 25% increase from a quiescent state. This is definitely not a snapshot program. But one would naturally think it is.
     
  8. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    FACT:
    With speccy running perfctrs.dll is continually accessed.
    And wbemcore.log is constantly written to at about 3kb/sec.

    Bad enough windows is always doing something the disk, let's not add any more un-necessary activity. Small amounts, to be sure, but I wouldn't leave it running longer than necessary if you have SSD. No need to use up those write cycles!

    Wbemcore.log and perfctrs.dll flood Sysinternals' Filemon's screen with speccy running.

    How do you stop that from happening? Or just perhaps use it and close it when done?
     
  9. Brandonn2010

    Brandonn2010 Registered Member

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    Where is this file saved so I can delete it?
     
  10. Inside Out

    Inside Out Registered Member

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    So is it the software version of a carcinogen?
     
  11. TomAZ

    TomAZ Registered Member

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    Does this happen with the portable version as well?
     
  12. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    Upon investigation the large file is created when the /debug mode is on. it would be stored in the same directory as speccy itself. Something not many people will do. I suppose. My colleague did though. I shall have a talk with him on it!

    But the other 65k file which is constantly refreshed at about 3KB/sec is stored in in the system32/wbem/logs folder. IIRC. The file is a sparse file and it doesn't grow, but crawls across the disk in a fifo-like manner. It is limited to about 65k. This WMI file is constantly being tickled.
     
    Last edited: Sep 24, 2013
  13. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    Speccy has high CPU consumption while it is running. High for a simple program that is supposed to only report system configurations.

    Tinfoil hat on:
    I wonder what else it is doing in the background?
    Tinfoil hat off:

    Common sense programming would have it drop to 0% after it scanned through the system and created the report. But instead it keeps playing with the disks and sucking up CPU cycles. eeek!
     
  14. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    You probably don't need or want to delete it. It doesn't go above 65k currently, it is like a sparse file. Other internal windows counters use it too.
     
  15. J_L

    J_L Registered Member

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    Haven't tried it myself, but maybe the results update in real-time.
     
  16. SweX

    SweX Registered Member

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    So is there really something wrong with Speccy, or didn't your colleague fully understand what would happen when the debug mode was ON?

    I also wonder what his purpose was to run Speccy overnight as you write in the first post. Why didn't he shut it down when he was done using it, unless he was troubleshooting or something like that?

    And have you or him checked if there is any option is Speccy to "clean logs" or "delete logs" or similar ?

    I am just wondering as I have thought about installing it a few times as it seems quite useful :)
     
  17. JRViejo

    JRViejo Super Moderator

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  18. login123

    login123 Registered Member

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    Fwiw.
    Just ran Speccy in win 7 and win xp, with and without debug mode.
    Process explorer and my ear don't show extraordinary disk usage either way.
    Cpu & RAM usage was OK, sort of "high normal". Its "busier" in debug mode.

    Speccy monitors real time temps, RAM usage, and network link speed, maybe more.
    So the log gets bigger after a while.
    It should if it monitors everything for many hours, right?

    Can't find evidence that it phones out except if check for updates is on.
    Not 100% sure of that.
     
  19. Robin A.

    Robin A. Registered Member

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    All monitor apps should have configurable detection frequency (variable between 1 sec and 15 min, for example). Speccy doesn´t.
     
  20. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    I don't believe that Speccy phones out for anything other than to tickle the network connection(s) to gather local hardware data.

    In this day and age of "the cloud", you never truly know.
     
  21. login123

    login123 Registered Member

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    It is possible to know who you're calling if you are interested enough.

    There are apps that will do it for you, and DOS commands.
    DOS see here . . . be careful w/ any dos commands.
    Code:
    http://lifehacker.com/302636/find-out-if-your-computer-is-secretly-connecting-to-the-web
     
  22. BoerenkoolMetWorst

    BoerenkoolMetWorst Registered Member

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    I think it also connects to the internet to determine your WAN IP.
     
  23. JohnBurns

    JohnBurns Registered Member

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    While I don't use Speccy, I feel the title of this thread is a little strong...lol.
     
  24. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    He was not aware of all the "features" in debug mode.
     
  25. SweX

    SweX Registered Member

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    Yep that sounds about right, not always easy the first time one use a software :)
     
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