NCSoft Launcher uses 17% of CPU??

Should the NCSoft Launcher be using 17% of my CPU power, even when it's minimized in the tray? To be fair, I see it use from 10% to 17%, but weighted strongly toward the high end of that scale.

I get 0% if I just bring it up and minimize it.

If I go to the CoH page in the launcher, that takes a chunk of CPU time for who knows what, can't just be the rotating graphic, can it?

So yes, you aren't crazy, the launcher is using a ridiculous amount of resources simply "idling". Guess that's just another good reason to configure it to go away while playing. Someone there (NCSoft/Paragon) should take a good hard look as to why this happens.

CPU % will parked at each page you can get to via the buttons on the left:

News page - 0%
Store page - 0%
CoH page - whoa! not trivial
Lineage II page - 0% (not on my machine)
Guild War page - 0% (not on my machine)
CoH Beta - 0% (not currently on my machine)
Aion - 0% (not on my machine)

Odd - tried this on mine

News page - 1% dropping to 0% within couple of seconds
Store page - 1% dropping to 0% within couple of seconds
CoH page - 2% dropping to 0% within couple of seconds
Lineage II page - 3% dropping to 0% within couple of seconds
Guild War page - 1% dropping to 0% within couple of seconds
CoH Beta - 2% dropping to 0% within couple of seconds
Aion - 3% dropping to 0% within couple of seconds

Which is pretty much what I would expect to see however every click increases the memory footprint - but then we all know about the memory leak.

My guess this is related to the web page being served rather than the launcher itself. - Either that or the OP has a trickle D/L kicking off.

Is anyone actually having issues with the NC Soft Launcher hanging after you exit the game and attempt to open it/relaunch it a little while later?

I open the launcher, play CoH, get mad b/c I cannot get a VR drop (lol), close the game, come back in an hour or so and try to relaunch the launcher from the taskbar to open up CoH and it hangs my Quad CPU @25% and I have to end the process manually. The same thing happens on my Dual Core machine (CPU @50%). Win7 64 on both with, 4-8GB RAM, etc..etc..

This is easily re-creatable and happens consistently each and every time...

Ideas/Suggestions?

Same here, NCSoft Launcher basically uses a full core and needs to be killed. Not necessarly after playing; If I let it run long enough, it'll crash anyway.

The real solution:
Don't leave it up and running!
Set it to only fire up long enough to start the game.
It's a very VERY badly behaved piece of software that shouldn't be used, save to launch the game.

Here's how:

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Are you guys running Windows 7 because I haven't had memory/crashing issues under Windows XP with this since i22 went to public beta. With the testing on migrations I did a little bit ago I'd forgotten to change the setting (to make it close) and realized recently that it's been open the whole time and I've been playing 4-6hr stints with no issues. Then again, I check for patches and make them finish before playing at all now.

You should see how much memory it chews up when left running, too.

I've had a couple friends complain about the game being really slow / laggy, and when I checked, the NCSoft Launcher was running and eating up over a gig of ram. For one of them, who still had an old machine with 2Gb in it, this was completely killing their ability to run the game.

I always recommend that everyone use the "Exit Launcher after starting game" option because of this.

Excellent advice Codewalker, sometimes I forget these things with how long I've been playing It amazes me when I glitch up then I check out the forums and get the reminder.

AV

Each app running has up to a 2GB chunk of memory that it thinks it has all to itself (32-bit Windows, sand /3GB flag). That memory can be in actual system memory or in the swap file. So the swap file can be as large as the sum of the memory requirements of all the apps running.

Windows defaults the swap file size to 1.5 times your system memory and can grow it from there if needed, unless you set the swap file to be a fixed size. Back in the early days of the game, pre I6/CoV, I recommended to set the swap file to a 2GB fixed size as a way to improve performance since most players back then had only 1GB of system memory and knew well enough to exit the rest of their apps (browser) when they played the game to conserve memory.

The swap file is still used even if you have enough system memory for all the apps running in the system. Windows will swap out infrequently accessed memory to the swap file so real system memory can be used immediately if needed or as part of the disk cache.

Try this: Start the launcher, on the top left click File>Settings. Under the general tab the bottom option should read: "After launching a game:", click the drop down under it and select "Exit Launcher" then click OK. What this will do is when you select to play a game, the NCSoft launcher will immediately exit shutting down the process entirely and all you will have is the game running.

I've been having a lot better luck lately using this trick. Before? Ugh...