What does "System" process do?

[Guest chuck59]

Hello everyone,

On one of my PCs, the "System" process is continously using 50% of the CPU resources. It just takes this % of resource even when there is nothing to do. I don't have any idea what this process do and how to prevent it from doing so as it looks an OS internal process.

Can somebody kindly let me know what is this process all about and why it's running wild on my system? Is it related to something wrong with OS or Hardware?

Thanks in advance

[nmX.Memnoch]

Do you mean the System Idle Process?

This one is a weird process because it actually shows how much CPU time is available to the system rather than how much that process is using...at least that's the way I've always translated it. At the time of typing this email that process shows 99% on my workstation, but the performance tab says I'm only using 1% of the CPU.

What does the performance tab show when the process says it's taking 50%?

Edited April 3, 2006 by nmX.Memnoch

[Mr Snrub]

"System" and "System Idle Process" are 2 different things.

The System process is a collection of threads which are in essence the kernel.

Typical symptoms of a driver problem are the System process running at 100% CPU utilisation in a single CPU system - that you say it is flat out at 50% would make me guess maybe you have a dual CPU or hyperthreaded system?

One thing you can try to do to get more information is get Process Explorer - you can double-click on any process and drill down to the thread level (select the "Threads" tab, it may take a short while to populate this view).

Then you can see which of the threads is/are consuming the the CPU time - the CPU column conveniently sorts the threads in order of CPU utilisation.

Highlight a thread with high usage and click the "Stack" button, then paste the output in here.

One thing to look for is whether it is a single, constant thread, or a collection of threads splitting the time between them, or a thread which runs at high CPU for a short time then is replaced by another thread (happens with high turnover of worker threads).

[cluberti]

Note that a lot of antivirus... "issues"... show up as using System CPU time - they all use file system filter drivers to do their jobs, so they'll show issues in the "System" (kernel) process. Not saying this is the case (use Process Explorer!), but it could be.