Performance issues caused by Nvidia drivers configuration

Gaming and Visualization Technologies General Topics and Other SDKs Drivers - Linux, Windows, MacOS
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Hi everyone!

I am a software engineer working on the Evernote app, and we recently spotted a performance issue caused by recent Geforce drivers.
Our users started reporting high cpu usage on the Evernote app after updating the Nvidia drivers: they also discovered that renaming the executable was a quick workaround to fix this performance issue.
The issue started with the Nvidia drivers released on May 2024, and it can be reproduced with the latest version as well (566.14).

We investigated further, and we found that the Nvidia drivers are shipping a custom profile for the evernote.exe executable, which looks to be the cause of these issues.

By using the ProcessExplorer, we noticed that there is a forever running thread using the nvMessageBus.dll, which causes the high CPU usage, even when the app is idle.

Screenshot 2024-11-12 213535
Screenshot 2024-11-12 2135351899Ă—1318 266 KB

By simply renaming our executable to evernote2.exe, the CPU usage drops to 0.1%.

Since this is an Nvidia provided settings, we can’t delete the profile using the Nvidia Control Panel. To countercheck that the issue was indeed coming from this setting, we used a third-party tool to manually remove the Evernote profile from the Nvidia drivers, and it worked.

Can you please provide technical assistance on this? Is there a way for us to prevent the Nvidia driver to apply this profile, or is there an official way of removing / disabling such profile from your driver?

It is a problem for our community, as it is affecting all the Windows users with an Nvidia graphic card.

Thanks so much!

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HI @dghironi, welcome to the NVIDIA developer forums.

Thank you for bringing this up! Some applications need indeed certain customizations and those are implemented on a case by case basis. Evernote was probably one of those in the past and might not have been revisited lately.

I opened an internal issue to track this. In case we already have a customer account with Evernote they might contact someone at your company directly. In any case I will add your email as well.

Thanks again!

1 Like
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Thanks so much @MarkusHoHo :)

If the customer account is an old one, it is possible it is not monitored anymore… please, make sure I am added to any communication regarding this internal issue :)

Thanks again!

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One more thing, could you please add some detail on a sample system setup where you encounter this issue?

Exact Windows version, GPU in use, CPU in use, etc. Basically what you see in “System->About” and similar.

What would also help would be to know which exact driver version started to show this behavior.

Thanks!

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I’ve reproduced this issue on Windows 11 Home, equipped with an Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super, and an Intel i7-10700K CPU.

By checking our Evernote forums, there are multiple threads of our users reporting the issue.
By quickly going through their messages, they started reporting this issue with version 555.99.
They also reported that the issue disappears when reverting to version 555.85, so the issue was introduced between versions 555.85 and 555.99 :)

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Thank you!

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Hi @MarkusHoHo , any news on this issue? :)

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No details I am at liberty to share here, I am sorry.

But it is progressing and there will hopefully be a fix for this soon.
We also added https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/152313-evernote-constantly-uses-100-of-a-core to the context.

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Any update on this @MarkusHoHo @dghironi . I can’t beleive 30% of my CPU performance has been taken up for a year by Evernote! I’ve actually upgraded hardware to “fix” this, not realising.

How hard can it be for Nvidia to remove a profile, or for Evernote to just give in to Nvidia’s inability to fix bugs in a timely manner and rename their exe?