Why does RVS 2010 run every 30 seconds?

What is it doing when it's doing nothing?

Like clockwork, RVS 2010 Home Free (rvsmon.exe) accesses my hard drive every 30 seconds, for about 10 seconds, reading or writing 50-70 K/sec, and using 25% of my CPU (maxing out one of the quad cores). Disk activity is almost entirely at the start and end of each 10-second run. Memory use by rvsmon.exe is constant, just under 30 MB. I've got EVERYTHING turned off in RVS: System Safe and Virus Guard are disabled, Virus Guard is set to not collect or send reports of malicious activity, remote control is turned off, it shouldn't be doing anything but occupying space in the System Tray area. I've spent hours adjusting it and scanning documentation and forums, no one mentions this 30-second cycle abuse.

The old version stayed quiet until I needed it, worked well when I used it, I recommended it to anyone I thought would understand it. It quit working when the license through Giveaway of the Day expired, would not "revert" to a free version as promised. Why is "progress" always a step backwards?

 

Hi mrdave740 and welcome to the forums

Can you get a screen shot of the activity? Disk writes can happen as RVS does not clone or restrict the Windows Pagefile or hibernation file as these can cause issues with Windows.

Thanks
Mike

 

Mike, thanks for the reply! Here's a screenshot of AnVir Task Manager. In case you're not familiar with the program, it's a more powerful alternative to Windows Task Manager. I "whited out" several sections of the screen and cropped it to get the size under the 300K limit for the forum.

Process list at top is sorted descending by disk activity, rvsmon.exe happened to be at the top when I hit Alt-PrintScreen. Note that rvsmon.exe is hilighted (selected). The bottom half of the display shows performance details. The "All Processes" box at upper left is unchecked, so the only data graphed is from the selected process, rvsmon.exe. Trust me, if I pick another process it all changes and the spikes go away (so spikes are NOT due to page file or hibernation file access). Timing between vertical green lines is 2 seconds, so it's 10 seconds of activity every 30 seconds. Full graph in this shot covers about 3 minutes.

Bright green plot shows CPU, full range of plot is set to 50% and you can see rvsmon.exe hits the 25% mark and stays there for most of the 10 seconds, effectively removing one of my quad cores from service 33% of the time. This is NOT good when I'm doing multitrack recording and mixdowns!

Bright yellow plot shows disk activity, mid-range on the graph is 2 MB/sec so rvsmon.exe is causing approx 1 to 1.5 MB/sec activity on one of my drives, mostly at the start and end of each CPU hogging cycle.

Bright red line is memory usage, no problems there, it never changes (it might if rvsmon was actually doing something to protect my system, but as I said in my earlier post, EVERYTHING it can do is disabled.

I see no network activity at all, even when I rescale the graph and hide everything else. So rvsmon is not continuously checking for new versions or virus signatures.

So it's not monitoring my files for any virus protection, it's not remapping disk activity to some "virtual" image anywhere, it's not maintaining access to a new System Safe partition. Another process, Radio Get, is actively running, playing music and recording it to MP3 files on the disk. For it I see disk activity spikes up to 4 MB/sec every minute, probably the time when it empties its memory buffer to disk. CPU usage barely registers. Another Task Tray process, Cafffeine, "presses" a Shift key every 60 seconds to keep my screen saver off -- it shows not measurable activity. So the issue with rvsmon.exe is not related to something Windows does with active processes or task tray process. Even Firefox, the biggest monster in memory at the moment, shows only one spike of disk activity above 64K/sec (all the way up to about 128K/sec) in the last 3 minutes.

So WHAT IS RVSMON.EXE doing when it's doing "nothing", and how can I get it to stop? Is there a way to load it when needed (without rebooting) for testing some new software or system changes, without it forcing itself to start with Windows on the next reboot? I know that's not what the developers have in mind, but it looks like the only possibility at this point.

Let me know if you want any "2-hour" snapshots of rvsmon.exe, Firefox, or other processes. It's amazing how dense the screen is from rvsmon for CPU and Disk Activity, while Firefox puts a strain on the system only when it first loads. I hope this can be fixed, I really liked my old version of Returnil and will try to reinstall it, maybe the tracks from the "Giveaway of the Day" offer have been erased by installing RVS 2010?

-Dave

Update: I clicked "Exit Program" on the Task Tray icon, it disappeared, but rvsmon.exe continued to run, showing the same pattern of CPU/Disk usage. So this is not related to Task Tray icon or user interface.

 

Hi,
Apologies for the delay in a reply.

The writes are part of an iissue we have identified that involves both server and client. The server portion of this should be cleared up later today and the client portion will be addressed with the next build release scheduled for next week.

For those with severe symptoms (Excessive CPU use and/or messages indicating internal product corruption) there is a work around that should provide relief until the new build is available:

1. Restart system in Windows Safe Mode
2. Open folder %SystemRoot%\System32\Returnil\RVS3
3. Delete the file with *.DB extension
4. Restart system in normal mode
5. Register the product again

For most users, this issue only results in a minor performance hit and we suggest that those with mild to moderate symptoms wait and apply the upgrade when released as it will address the issues automatically.

Please forgive any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience and continued support.

Returnil Support

 

Coldmoon, your recommended fix worked perfectly. I no longer see any measurable CPU activity when I expect rvsmon.exe to be idle, and the disk access is very minor now - about 4-8K/sec every 8 seconds. It sounds like your next upgrade will fix even that small hit. I still have the Virus Guard and System Safe turned off in the testing I just did.

Thanks for the quick and helpful response - I have the feeling I'll soon be recommending RVS 2010 to many people!