Acpi.sys performance issues

Question

Hi,
Many music producers encounter live audio recording issues because of acpi.sys high DPC latency.
This problem has been going on for years now.
I've seen many MVPs replying with brute force checklists that do not solve anything.
I've seen many frustrated microsoft customers reinstalling windows in an attempt to solve this issue and eventually simply switching to Mac.
I know that acpi.sys is the culprit cause I can see it's latency on LatencyMon and after disabling 'Microsoft Surface ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery' the problem is solved.
So my question is simple, is Microsoft aware of this problem?

Answer 1

Good morning,

I have a few customers, including one I'm trying to fix right now that have the issue that is causing difficulty to run real-time audio. These customers are DJs and sound producers and the only way I get this to disappear from the Latency Monitor reports, is to use Process Hacker to suspend the ACPI.SYS threads. Even if I disable the device under Device Manager, it's not enough.

Now, unfortunately, if I suspend the ACPI.SYS threads, the system becomes unstable and crashed after a few minutes. I believe there might be a ACPI performance control check that cannot execute and then crashes the system and reboots by itself.

Because of this DPC Latency, the system is not suitable for real-time audio even if all the components (latest Dell G5 with i7, 16GB ram, SSD, etc) should be more than sufficient. My customers basically experience intermittent sounds cut-off or noise.

I've set all power management recommendations, driver updates, windows updates, etc.... nothing works.

Please help, my Dell laptops are not working efficiently because of this and I'm about to lose this business to the profit of Apple.

Is there any specific updates on this?

Tks for you help!

Answer 2

Answer 3

I have totally slayed this problem on an Alienware Windows 11 PC. Same ACPI.sys massive latencies. Download PRocess Lasso and ParkControl. Disable parking on all cores. In Process Lasso, go to Tools and Tweak Multimedia Class Scheduler:

Then set this (just select Pro Audio from the drop down and click Save and Exit):

These are my ParkControl settings:

This is a very recent model processor, with 24 "heterogenous" processor cores. There are 8 "Performant" cores, this setting schedules long-lived threads on those. I am still seeing the same huge ACPI.sys latencies, but now they don't splatter my audio from Ableton Live and an old TASCAM US-1800 audio interface. I also installed the nVidia Studio driver first, that seemed to help a bit as well. I hope this post sticks here, my last one did not! My system ran ALL NIGHT for the first time since I connected a monitor to my nVidia adapter (this was what triggered this mess) and I'm running two external HDMI monitors and lots of other stuff and I am one happy cat!

Answer 4

And it gets from bad to worse from here. 2 months back when I opened up my DAW, there isn't any lag, but now just by navigating around within the page, you can literally see the lag here and there. Audio wise? Forget about it, the problem seems to be revolving around the latency issue then again.

Please do not reformat your windows or even go for a clean boot, it is useless. I have tried all. Producing music is my job, but now it seems almost impossible to even compose without having constant frustrations.

Erm, can anyone from the official team PLEASE do something. Life is hard enough, and to face these unnecessary issues isn't what we are paying for buying a PC instead of a Mac. No threats here, just extremely frustrated.

IT KILLS MOTIVATION AND MORALE! Come on!

Answer 5

I think Microsoft could prepare a native profile for low latency and audio professionals, as this is a pain point for me as well. Similar to how they created the gaming profile. Everything would adapt to low latency audio. It would make all the people who haven't given up on audio on windows overwhelmingly happy. Please microsoft try to figure this out.