Ok folks, I’ve encountered an odd issue in some software we’ve developed. I figured it may be interesting to toss it out here, in case anyone has an ideas. I’ve not been able to google any concrete solutions, or even other folks running into this.
We have a Java application that uses a map based on NASA’s Worldwind package. Everything works fine in most cases.
However, in one particular installation, we started seeing extremely high CPU usage spikes, generally when interacting with the worldwind map pane. The exact same use had no such spikes on other machines.
We were then able to reproduce it on another machine at the same location. But then the problem did not show up on a 3rd machine there. The only apparent difference between the machines was that the one which ran things fine was Windows 7 Professional, while the other ones (the problem machines) were running Windows 7 Enterprise.
This seems to be the key, as we had never run it on Windows 7 Enterprise previously, and so that would explain why we never ran into the issue. But the question remains, what exactly would cause such an issue?
From looking at the differences between versions, I’m thinking that it MAY be due to Bitlocker file encryption. This is a feature of the Enterprise version, but not the professional version. It may be screwing up something in terms of streaming map data from the disk. This is pure speculation at this point.
So, while I don’t really expect anyone to necessarily know about this, I figured it may be worth throwing out there, on the off chance anyone knows about bitlocker and has seen similar issues with it.