I brought home a new MacBookPro the other day (well yesterday) It had nothing but a clean install of 10.7.2, I installed Skype, and did a bit of video calling, to my surprise it was using over 300% of the CPU. Unless if it is solving the cure to cancer, that should not happen.
I tried multiple versions of the software, and they were all taking up the same amount of CPU cycles. Fucking frustrating!
This is the after picture:
The fix hack:
I realized that Skype uses peer to peer with supernode peers for call routing. I have a Rogers extreme connection, without a firewall, and my IP for the mac placed in the DMZ.
I enabled the Mac OSX Firewall, and disallowed incoming connections to Skype, so now I can video chat, and as well have the CPU stable at around 60% instead of 300+%
However, I noticed that Skype will automatically switch to HD Video when there is enough bandwidth, and there is no way to limit that, how fucking stupid. 1.2mbps video for an hour is 4.2 gigabytes. Imagine someone in a long distance relationship.
Anyhow, I use a Mac, and using ipfw I am able to limit the bandwidth used by Skype, thus it should not show HD videos anymore, and effectively also lowering the CPU temperature.
The two rules that limits my Skype to only use 70kilobyes per second. (246 megabytes/h)
ipfw pipe 55555 config bw 70KByte/s
ipfw add 55555 pipe 55555 src-port 5665 #the port Skype is using
THANK YOU! This totally helped.
Is there a way of limiting this for Windows 7?
Im using a i5 2500k overclocked to 4.4MHz and im sick and tired of it using 60% of my CPU when video calling. Its rediculous.
Ive found many people say its actually an advert in the Skype home section (the little house button on the main window) that causes it to use this much but there is no advert there for me to close.
Anyway this is really annoying. Any help would make me eternally grateful.
I used ipfw which is just a firewall that has the feature to limit bandwidth by port or application.
With Windows, check out: NetLimiter or SoftPerfect Bandwidth Manager.
TBH, any freeware “bandwidth limiter” or even firewall that supports limit bandwidth by application or port will work.
Hi, I recently noticed in my version of skype; 5.8.0.158 during video calling my cpu fan would spin up excessively, and, in windows 7 task manager all 8 of my threads would be hovering around 60%, as soon as i closed the video call it would resume to usual idling levels. My solution was to change the affinity of the skype.exe (*32) process to allow it only to be executed on my last two cores; (CPU 6 and CPU 7). This instantly solved the problem, even with skype just running on the single physical core task manager shows that core around 50%. I cannot notice any difference in bandwidth / video quality so can only assume it is duplicating all the processing exponentially across multiple threads, or some sort of load balancing algorithm has failed.