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CPU Usage Update Speed Effect on CPU Usage?


AEN007

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17Jan2009

Greetings.

Two related questions here.

1) Does the CPU Usage update speed affect CPU usage?

When I set the update speed to normal,

(reported) CPU usage increases materially

from (reported) CPU usage with speed set to low.

Could anyone confirm that/how much

this setting affects (actual) CPU usage?

2) Would/Does this setting affect (actual) CPU usage

even when the Windows Task Manager is

minimized to the Tray or not even "activated" at all?

Any replies/insights appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,

AEN

Æ

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If you've got a very old/slow computer I assume you might see slightly higher usage when setting the update speed to high.

But if anything at all it's got to be to a very minor extent, absolutely nothing to worry about.

Why do you even have to keep the task manager mnimized?

It's so easy to start it when needed, just hit ctrl+shift+esc.

This is one of those things that can be considered a total non-issue, no offence to you for asking but that's what it is.

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23Jan2009

Greetings.

I am appreciative of your/the reply.

I am indifferent as to your opinion.

Our HW & SW are supposed to be so powerful,

but they do not impress me.

It does not take much to send

CPU usage to 100% on my 3 XP laptops -

1 with 1gb RAM &

a Dual-mode, high-performance

Mobile Intel® Mobile Pentium® 4 Processor-M

at 1.8GHz | 400 MHz FSB

1 with 1gb RAM &

a Intel® Celeron® M Processor 370

1 MB L2 Cache | 1.5 GHz | 400 MHz FSB;

1 dinosaur with 160mb RAM &

a Pentium II 233 MHz

512 KB L2 cache.

When CPU is @ 100%, the computer is mostly unresponsive.

I hate trying to work on an unresponsive computer.

I used to keep the Windows Task Manager (WTM)

minimized in the tray, but that was not good enough for me.

I now keep the WTM open all the time

(mostly off screen) in the lower right corner.

Now I know fairly well what will send CPU usage to 100%

& obviously always what the CPU usage is; so

I can wait to try to work on the computer

until CPU is no longer at 100%.

The WTM update speed does affect CPU usage

& unacceptably so on the dinosaur laptop.

Thank you.

Regards,

AEN

Æ

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It's got to be something else than the actual task manager that affects CPU usage, check which processes have the highest CPU usage.

And also, how many active processes (check lower left corner of taskman) do you have on those computers?

A large number of processes will make them slow, always try to keep that number below 30 when not using any other programs.

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25Jan2009

Greetings.

One of my original questions remains unanswered

Would/Does this setting affect (actual) CPU usage

even when the Windows Task Manager is

minimized to the Tray or not even "activated" at all?

A few years ago I found a TechRepublic article

"Windows XP services that can be disabled".

Anyone interested (who joins TechRepublic)

could (probably still) find this useful article there.

My question/point is not that

the TM sends CPU usage to 100%.

As I said, it doesn't take much-

simply compiling a script sends CPU usage to 100%.

Sometimes a copy/move/delete op does as well.

Almost all/any multimedia processing certainly does.

Sometimes a minimized Opera browser does ...

I hope I live to see the day

our personal computers can really multitask

without the 100% CPU usage unresponsiveness.

Maybe Linux already can ...

I've yet to ever try/use Linux.

Any replies/insights appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,

AEN

Æ

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Seems like I'm the only one trying to help you in this thread.

Your computers are not really new, in fact they're condisered old and slow by today's standards.

And as I said you probably have lots of other processes running at the same time (you didn't say how many).

If you would have a dual core CPU and/or an optimized system you wouldn't have to worry about such small "problems".

I've got a P3 1.26 which is very responsive and quick, but that one is highly optimized.

The update speed affects the CPU usage to a very small extent (I've said it before).

But don't worry about CPU usage, you should worry more about the system being slow and unresponsive (and finding ways to fix it).

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Would/Does this setting affect (actual) CPU usage even when the Windows Task Manager is minimized to the Tray or not even "activated" at all?

...

My question/point is not that the TM sends CPU usage to 100%. As I said, it doesn't take much- simply compiling a script sends CPU usage to 100%. Sometimes a copy/move/delete op does as well. Almost all/any multimedia processing certainly does. Sometimes a minimized Opera browser does ...

Clearly, anything that does something MUST spend some CPU to get it done. Open enough sensors and fancy graphs in Sysmon or Resource Meter or Norton and you can bring things to a crawl as you head-butt into the Law of Diminishing Returns. This can become a classic case of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle Observer Effect. My own feeling about this is that there is something silly about using the CPU to measure CPU usage :wacko: . Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it until Intel places a data collection tap on the Processor for external hardware to monitor (think of the Digital Doc gadgets that sit in a drive bay connected to fans/thermometers which displays the data on its own tiny LCD screen at no CPU cost).

In theory you should not worry about 100% usage (keeping in mind it is not really 100%, more later), because that would mean the CPU is hard at work doing something presumably useful. If it is 100% hard at work doing nothing, well, it is time to look around and find what malware, or defective driver or mis-coded application is running. As for Opera burning up the CPU cycles, minimized or not, what webpage is it looking at? Close all the webpages (no tabs) and check its usage. The browser itself downloading 50 files simultaneously wouldn't use 100% CPU, but some ridiculous Flash or Java element might try. Also, thanks to the insane tendency to rely on Javascript code for everything web related, crappy scripting could easily gobble up a sizeable piece of the CPU alloted to Opera, but it should not drag the system itself down (more later).

I hope I live to see the day our personal computers can really multitask without the 100% CPU usage unresponsiveness.

Of course Windows can and does Multitask. It is only time-slicing the CPU availability between all the tasks that it is capable of delegating. It is possible that a task or process can go awry and not play well with others since any programmer can create an endless loop even in a batch file. It is also possible to sabotage the CPU scheduling performed by Windows if one alters priorities for applications and forgets they did it. As mentioned above, if someone set Opera.exe to some high priority it may open the door for some webpage element to eat up more CPU than they normally could. An infinite variety of scenarios exist when you consider the possibilities of raising some apps priority while lowering others. I favor keeping them all at normal, which in theory leaves Windows in charge and should mitigate most runaway scenarios.

With respect to the 100% displayed in a System Monitor, it is easy to over-emphasize the importance of the arbitrary units a programmer selects when displaying data output, be it a graph or a percentage indicator. If you ever programmed a progress bar control (or just played around in Excel charting or graphing data) you'll see that you can make it fast/slow or do anything (what do they say about statistics again?). Granularity is the game here. I like to think of Processor Usage charting as a relativistic endeavor in that it can only quantify the CPU as perceived from its narrow perspective.

A good question to ponder is this: when is the CPU(s) ever close to doing nothing? On modern motherboards the answer is practically never (disregarding power off, lockups, HALT instructions and suspend/hibernate!). Consider the Health features in most BIOS. There we see a set of data points like temperature and fan speed being updated in realtime. The CPU is busy processing routines polling sensors, performing math, issuing screen writes (or updating video buffers) so that we can have a nice listing of degrees centigrade/farenheit and RPM etc. In reality the CPU is actually busy all the way from power on, through all the BIOS, up to and way beyond that point in time where it seeks a boot loader for an OS. Decades ago, we would at this point in the bootstrap get dropped into an A:\ or C:\ prompt in what we now call single DOS mode. It was here that a powered-up CPU was probably as close to zero percent usage as is possible.

But what is the theoretical 0 % CPU usage nowadays under the Windows GUI? Certainly the more recent the version of Windows is, the more tasks are being executed all the time. Since Windows is really doing nothing more than polling for, sending and processing messages one can deduce that the CPU must always busy. All this activity must be pre-factored into the Zero % baseline of your favorite Task Manager (actually it would need to include all CPU processing below Windows and its GUI and message handling plus all low level BIOS functions like alarms and hardware support). The remaining CPU bandwidth after all of these considerations is what is truly available to me and you, and is hopefully being charted in a system monitor.

(When Win95 gold came out, I first installed it on a 66 MHz i486 and ran all kinds of Watches, API monitors, Spy++, Debuggers, Snipers and Uber Hacking utilities to see the enormous amount of things occuring in realtime. That CPU was an order of magnitude slower than anything sold today. Plus, since then Windows has grown larger in every direction. Suffice it to say, it is very busy in there. You can get a small taste of this by running System Internals ProcMon on WinXP and above, and watch it attempt to record countless very high level events. My guess is that ProcMon can only access a very small fraction of the work done from the CPU's much lower-level point of view.)

IMHO, system monitors have one practical purpose, and that is relative comparison. 100% divided among some 30 items in TM lets us evaluate those items with respect to each other. Any given item will typically hover around the same number from session to session. If the magic number you are used to is 76%, and at some later date you see something different, it just might be worth looking into (of course this presumes that the same tool is used in both instances, it is not scientific to compare Task Manager to Norton or whatever). Such readings may indicate that a problem is afoot. You may very well have something radically mis-configured or some malware or a defective driver. You should take the time to record the figures you see in there to post for others to scan over. Perhaps someone will notice something!

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  • 1 month later...

6March2009

Greetings.

I originally posted two questions out of curiosity.

One of my original questions remains unanswered

Would/Does this setting affect (actual) CPU usage

even when the Windows Task Manager is

minimized to the Tray or not even "activated" at all?

So far I've not heard anything nouvelle(novel).

The point is not whether CPU usage is 100% or 76%.

The point is that the computers are unresponsive/unusable sometimes.

Those times are when the Windows Task Manager (WTM) says CPU usage is 100%.

I've kept a careful eye on active processes for years.

WTM says most of the active processes have 0% CPU usage.

Dual core is certainly not the ultimate answer.

Using audio edit software on a movie soundtrack can keep CPU usage at 100% for a half an hour.

Using video edit software on a movie file can keep CPU usage at 100% for a hours.

In any case I still wonder about my original unanswered question.

Any replies/insights appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,

AEN

Æ

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In any case I still wonder about my original unanswered question.

Any replies/insights appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,

AEN

Æ

A quick answer is "It doesn't affect CPU usage".

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