Why is ATH.exe using 50% of my CPU?

turning off the wifi synchronisation solved the issue for now. CPU back from 100% to 3-6%

hope Apple will make a solution, I have been using this feature from the beginning and use it daily. It is like going back in time without this..... Well, this can happen.... but it is not professional, not normal for Apple.

Unfortunately the 'netsh winsock reset' command is only a temporary fix. A few hours later I imagine the issue will return. The only way I was able prevent the issue permanently was by disabling wireless sync.

yea ... same deal here, plus a couple ATH.exe crashes thrown in for good measure.

Win7 64bit

Turning wifi sync off did seem to stop the CPU issue, but obviously is something that needs a proper fix.

Same problem here - iTunes 10.7.0.21 on Win 7 64 - iOS 6 - very frustrating that I can't use wireless sync due to this issue

I've been wondering why my normally quiet PC's fan has been running like crazy lately, and have isolated it to this ATH.exe. Since a major overhaul of iTunes is supposed to be right around the corner, I don't expect to see it fixed until then. I would bet that it comes at the same time as the next major iOS product release.

The worst part though, is that the wifi sync doesn't even work for me anymore, even when using 50% cpu...

Any new updates to this issue? I got tired of constantly killing off my ATH.exe process so I turned off wireless sync, but that almost annoys me more now. Reinstalling iTunes didn't help either. (Windows 7, iOS 6)

I've got the same symptoms: ATH.exe starts soaking up 100% CPU, and I have to kill it. I'll try disabling wireless syncing, which has never worked reliably for me in any case.

Same problem, Windows 7 x64. I wish there was a trimmed down version of iTunes that didn't hog your system resources!

I want to join the discussion now, I have the same problem, it seems that iTunes uses a ATH.exe for every iOS Device it has in its list, my iPad seemed to not take any CPU because it was plugged in, my iPhone however, was not, so the ATH.exe for my iPhone took constantly ~25% CPU, Wireless Sync didn't work anyway 😀

Even if I plugged in my iPhone, I just got an error, so I ejected it, now if I plug it in, it works fine, second ATH.exe started again, but not taking any CPU because both devices are plugged in, if I now take it back out of my dock, its still connected to the PC, it doesn't take any CPU, so that might be the temporary solution for the problem, however, that still makes no sense to me 😀

Same problem here - Windows 64-bit. ATH.exe goes nuts after a little while and wireless syncing does not work. I had to turn off wireless syncing on all my iDevices. Kinda annoying. I really like that feature, but it's not usable on Win7 64-bit iTunes.

Windows 7 32 bit also shows this problem. More generally, iTunes for Windows is practically unusable in any setting I've discovered... either it slows everything down, loses files, garbles files, won't connect to devices, won't allow moving files...

It's just a lemon. Sadly, we all have to live with it if we want iOS devices.

I'm running Vista (I know, but what can you do? It came with the computer!) and I googled ath.exe to find out what was going on, and ended up at this post. Has anyone heard anything back from Apple yet after starting a ticket? I'd really like to update my Iphone wireless-ly, considering all the hoopla that was generated around it. I, too, have had unreliable results with the wifi sync. And it tends to cause iTunes to hang.

I'm having exactly the same problem (ath.exe*32 using 50% CPU) I'm also on Windows 7 64-bit.

How fix it?

Me too, Win 7 x64, 8 core machine, so it takes up 13% (basically 1 core goes up to 100%) ...

Horrible workaround:

Kill ath.exe using Task Manager, go to iTunes, click on iPad and click Sync. Gives me a dialog box saying "Finding iPad"... which sticks for a long'ish time, but works eventually.