From the "you can't make this stuff up department", this 2003 gem from blogging O.G. John Dvorak:
The things I learn here. I now know not to read Dvorak, except for amusement.
Dumb Question about what Dvorak is trying to describe but apparently not doing a very good job of:
From Eam Romulo A. Ceccon, I learn the issue of interrupts/DPCs being associated with System Idle. Interesting because…
I experience this sort of slowdown every time time I reboot my box. At startup, I see System Idle near 100%, but I can’t get the machine to do ANYTHING.
I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m dumb enough to run Norton Internet Security full blown. I’m sure Norton is the culprit, I think it’s the Live Updater. I assume this means that it’s engaged in activity that, intentionally or not, involves a lot of interrupts/DPCs?
Hi Jeff,
Did you read thru the forum that followed the article? He 'fesses up on page three.
ref: http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/3/292401001/ShowThread.aspx
Apropos of nothing, do you think it’s possible for a process to use very little cpu cycles, yet perform an awful lot of I/O?
A really odd comment from Dvorak that. But then I guess he is known for them.
To twist his words into a valid point though, why we spend money on such powerful processors just to have them sit idle for 99.9999% of their life.
Couldn’t the CPU/OS find something to amuse itself with while I’m surfing the web?
(Cue: Grid computing)
Or couldn’t the CPU throttle itself back so that the current workload keeps it busy enough, but maintains responsiveness?
(Cue: AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet)
At startup, I see System Idle near 100%, but I can’t get the machine to do ANYTHING
This is probably due to the disk going nuts, loading in all your startup applications. The CPU won’t be doing much other than waiting for the disk to complete its work. Vista does a better job of this, deferring more of the startup work so you can begin interacting with the desktop earlier.
Or, you could upgrade to a faster hard drive… it does make a difference:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000800.html
I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m dumb enough to run Norton Internet Security full blown
Yes, you may want to take a look at this, specifically the table of benchmark results in the middle:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html
In my country, a so called computer expert said that the Internet would never be popular. This was 1995, and I can understand why someone who have never tried it said so. He thought that the need for human interaction would also stop webshops
The real WTF is that he repeated those statements in 1998 !!! Even Bill Gates had figured out that “the net” was the future…
I agree, AMD cool 'n quiet is a nice solution, features like this are on most laptop CPU’s (but I stay away from intel, so it doesn’t really matter). however, executing a HLT instruction in a never-ending loop would just HLT once and stop. am I getting something wrong here?
You got it wrong, when the OS is idle, it gets the monitor with its z80 to run the networking, refresh the screen, and poll the keyboard, and so on . . . lol
Come on dude smell the silicon
Not the brightest bulb in the shed, this Dvorak. He’s become famous with his controversial opinions about Everything and even boasts about it. His ability to blog and the air-time that Leo’s given him only made matters worse.
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to infer what “idle process” does, does it?
In defense of Dvorak,
I would not call myself inexperienced in computer affairs, but this thing has fooled me too. At the time, I googled to see if the ‘System Idle Process’ might be spyware. When I look at the processes list, I expect it to report on the amount of resources each process takes up. I would expect to get the amount of idle time by doing a sum of all the processes’ resources. You don’t expect an ‘idle’ process reporting it ‘takes up’ all your spare resources! The way it works in windows is completely valid, and there’s logic to it, but you have to get your head around it.
I love Dvorak. He’s like some grumpy old man that’s full of opinions based on assumptions and very little fact. One of my favorite things to do is save his most insane PC Mag articles, like the one about how there will never be $500 comptuers or the one about how broadband will never take off, and then re-read them a year later just to see how horribly wrong he is.
My new favorite is: a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1923151,00.asp"Apple will switch to Windows./a
"To twist his words into a valid point though, why we spend money on such powerful processors just to have them sit idle for 99.9999% of their life.
Couldn’t the CPU/OS find something to amuse itself with while I’m surfing the web?
(Cue: Grid computing)
Or couldn’t the CPU throttle itself back so that the current workload keeps it busy enough, but maintains responsiveness?
(Cue: AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet)"
The problem with running the CPU at 100% constantly is heat, there are plent of things (Like Folding@Home) that use Idle CPU time to compute various stuff. A lot of laptops throttle the speed back when running on battery power to reduce power-consumption - I’m not sure if desktop’s do this (Or when the CPU would be throttled back - I’d think if it had to speed the CPU up every time it was used, and throttle it when ever it’s idle would slow the processor down. As for why people buy such powerful processors and have them idle for most of the time - You don’t buy a fire alarm to use constantly, you buy it only for when (or hopeful “if”) you need it. Having a CPU than can run a game at decent speeds, if only for an hour at at time, is useful. Being able to occasionally render a video quickly without having to wait a week is useful too… Having a fast processor is… scalable, where as a slow processor that is on the verge of struggling with basic web-browsing is only ever going to be able to browse the web…
Erm, all these complaints stating “Dvorak[…] isn’t the brightest bulb in the sheed” and such have failed to notice one very important part :
“fellow columnist Bill Machrone started an interesting e-mail thread recently asking people at the magazine about whether some of the newer XP patches might have screwed up VPN access. This thread evolved into various complaints about XP changing with each new patch”
The system-idle process complaint wasn’t made by him, it was someone complaining via email about a WinXP Patch…
I, like Paul, thought the excerpt must have been tongue-in-cheek, in the same vein as lines like:
“I can’t find the any key!”
“Who is General Failure, and what is he doing on my hard disk!?”
Windows Task Manager shows CPU usage as a percentage. That means you should be able to account for 100% of your CPU. The idle task ‘holds’ CPU resources to account for idle CPU resources.
Don’t blame the CPU every time your machine bogs down. High priority tasks may bog your machine down as they wait on other resources, like I/O or network responses. The lack of a particular resource while performing a given task, and its subsequent drag on your system, is called a bottle neck. CPU is a common bottle neck but also is often the target of a misdiagnosis in an unresponsive system. Meaning it is very possible for your machine to be ‘stuck’ even with a high percentage of CPU resources in the idle task.
Jeff,
Why do you even respond to that guy? Seriously, what was the last insightful piece he wrote? I can’t remember it.
I mean, here’s a guy who basically stays famous in geek circles because people mistakenly think that he’s the guy who made the keyboard…
Dvorak’s good at one thing: generating heaps of traffic via flamebait.
That said, the task manager UI sucks. Idle process should at least be displayed differently, e.g. faded out. It would be better to leave it out, have the real tasks adding up to 100% (or not), and state somewhere else (and visually) how much overall CPU is being used.
Processor Usage:
|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If I’m not mistaken, the resources displayed for “System Idle Process” also include hardware interrupts, which most definitely can slow down a system.
So yeah, while this Dvorak is obviously an idiot, he may actually be somewhat correct. Of course, the Jeff would also be correct in calling it “some strange, unrelated problem,” as this sort of slowdown would be caused by a poorly-configured driver.
Yes-- that is a bizarre comment. Possibly meant tongue-in-cheek, though, or at least that’s the only way I could imagine someone would write something like that.
The whole issue reminds of the various kinds of “System Doctor” software from the days of Win95 and the like. One would always get warnings like “Your system is using 90% of its RAM!!”. Well, I paid a pretty penny for that RAM as well as the rest of the contraption-- so it better darn well be using it!
I honestly thought this was just a given!
Task Manager also accounts the time to service interrupts and DPCs as belonging to System Idle Process. Thus, it’s possible to have a nearly unresponsive system with heavy interrupt and DPC activity yet the CPU usage for the System Idle Process is at 99%.