Obviously Eam is faster than me. 
dbr:
Erm, all these complaints stating âDvorak[âŚ] isnât the brightest bulb in the sheedâ and such have failed to notice one very important part :
âŚ
The system-idle process complaint wasnât made by him, it was someone complaining via email about a WinXP PatchâŚ
You may have failed to notice a very important part yourself. From the article:
âHere are a few of my gripes â most of them a result of excessive patching.â (Emphasis added)
The complaints calling him stupid are quite clearly correct.
ââŚa computer journalist of his tenure and stature.â
Right. Dvorak is just a journalist who made a niche for himself writing about computers. Heâs become comfortable enough in his own opinion to wander into areas he only vaguely understands, and periodically it bites him on the ass. Sort of like a music critic who casually plays piano but has never written a song.
Only computer illiterate people jump to conclusions that are purely based on what Task Manager is telling. Everyone else uses perfmon and process explorer. Thankfully in Vista the perfmon is finally usable too.
I didnât know he had a âtenure and statureâ since I donât buy magazines that spend real estate on their past, i.e. âwhere we were 25 years agoâ type crap, kinda like the Lifehacker: âa year ago todayâ links. Who gives a crap?
disclaimer: I am receiving a free PCMag through some free mail order form I filled out online (those coupon sites feeds are great IMO), so I have seen the name before, and read the column once lol.
That PCMag article is pretty hilariousâit really does sound like he has a virus or considerable amounts of spyware that are contributing to his computerâs sluggishness. At the end he asks for people to share, but refuses to hear those who arenât having problemsâie people who maintain their computers well. Sheesh.
When you add the CPU time column to the list of Taskmanager columns, things get more interesting. Looking at any multi-processor (or multi-core machine), the CPU time column will show the Idle process has taken a lot more time than the machine has been running. If Dvorak has a hard time understanding the 95% bit, his brain would probably explode on that oneâŚ
Like Cary Millsap put it in his (excellent) Oracle tuning book:
âAny system has an infinite capacity for waitingâ
Hello, there really is an issue with the idle process of windows. While you are right that it should be what the wikipedia article tells, it is sometimes behaving quite strangely.
Microsoft does undisclosed things during idle which can sometime really bog down the machine. I had once the case, the laptop of my niece that became slow like molasses in certain games. Looking at the task manager, it was always idle process taking 95% of CPU time. The games were not playable anymore. After long tries I found out what happened. The laptop was freshly installed with XP, nothing special happened. Then, when the PC worked OK my niece started to use its computer for the things she does with it: playing, messaging and surfing. So she connected to the internet via Ethernet and then the thing crawled. I first thought of virus infection, but it was Windows automatic update in the background. The thing works in background within the idle process, and bogs down the machine. Now that the update is complete the idle hog is gone.
Your CPU Usagage is 3% so what does it mean exactly that the System Idle process is using 98%?
I actually enjoy listening to Dvorak at crankygeeks.com and his guest appearances at twit.tv (main podcast). Heâs sometimes offtrack in his predictions but so what? Many people are that. Just filter out what you think is wrong.
BTW, your captcha always displays âorangeâ for me.
Coming from a lot of UNIX (mostly SunOS/Solaris) and Linux experience, I always wondered why Windows NT (and successors 2000, XP, Vista) had an explicit âSystem Idle Processâ. I guess it makes sense in that the same system could have a different process for an AMD versus Intel processor, or even vastly different for the other architectures that NT used to support like MIPS and Alpha.
By the way, the init process does more than just sit around and wait for its processes to die. init is generally the first process that the kernel executes after it is finished loading. That is why it gets process id 1. init is responsible for system startup and shutdown. On boot, it mounts all the filesystems (except for the root FS, which is already mounted by the kernel). It then starts up all the system services in the correct order. After that, it manages login processes for user logins. When it gets a shutdown request, it shuts down all the services in the correct order and umounts the filesystems. So like any âserviceâ process, most of the time it just sits there. That doesnât mean it isnât important.
Note that with Linux, you can pass the kernel options through the bootloader. The option âinit=/bin/bashâ will tell the kernel to run /bin/bash instead of â/sbin/initâ (the default). Instead of normal system startup, you will get a command prompt on the console. Youâll be able to execute some commands. If you type âexitâ or Control-D, youâll get the kernel message âInit processs finishedâ.
Couldnât the CPU/OS find something to amuse itself with while Iâm surfing the web?
Check out http://www.seti.org or http://boinc.berkeley.edu
At least System Idle doesnât load the CPU, in spite of what the figures say. Try to start Disk Defragmenter (just run it, donât start actual defragmentation or analysis) and leave it idle for a night - it DOES load CPU and heats it like hell.
I agree, AMD cool 'n quiet is a nice solution, features like this are on most laptop CPUâs
AMD Cool ânâ Quiet isnât just for laptops though. I have it activated on my desktop (Athlon 64 3800 X2). I switched it on in the BIOS and then installed the official AMD driver from:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,30_182_871_13118,00.html
They also have a âDashboardâ app which reports the CPU speed and voltage so that you can check it is working properly.
âDvoraksayswhat?â
Dunno why but when I read this I almost fell over laughing.
On a serious note tho, from the Wikipedia entry, ââŚan idle task is a special task loaded by the OS scheduler only when there is nothing for the computer to doâ,
The idle task is an actual task that gets âloadedâ? I thought that it was just a representation of idle, not an actual task. Or, is it that from an OS time accounting perspective there is a do-nothing task that gets loaded so that you have something to measure against?
Indeed, and the working set is quite compact, too!
It is really strange; UI hides as much things as it shows! Compare TaskManager with top command of unix; this plain text output gives you more info that you expect; it makes you think like computer scientist; processes, zombies; sleeping; running; io wait etc.
I think this was the reason that Tim Berner Lee never wanted anything to appear on www but text!
for those complaining about windows update slowing down their system, there is a fix:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windowsupdatetid=507fdfc2-c65b-4d88-bdee-9dc79a8e975fp=1
performance graph does show hardware interrupts (view - show kernel times), but the process list does not show them. sysinternal process explorer will list the hardware interrupts on the process list. if you are having heavy usage by hardware interrupts (1-5%) for extended periods, you likely have a driver issue or hardware issue.
oh. I am thinking of the older computers, I have never programmed an x86 processor.
System Idle Process is not a real process, regardless of its name, itâs not init. Itâs just the result of a perfmon query to the kernel for unused time, as opposed to per-process used time.
The process you want to look closely at when the thing goes bonkers is System - that represents the kernelâs DPCs, IO, CPU, and other counters (but not memory). Donât ever confuse the two, or youâll never be taken seriously when you need help, because anyone who has familiarity with windows realizes that idle canât do anything. (Specifically aimed at totolamoto, whoâs describing how System, svchost, and update.exe tagteam to beat up your system, which is totally unrelated to the idle process - it gets out of their way as it should.)
And sometimes itâs not the kernel, itâs just some other badly written software using up all the GDI handles or something ludicrous like that.
Gabriel, HLT isnât permanent, the processor reawakens at the next interrupt, which comes on a clock tick if no hardware is begging for attention. Oh, wiki has an article, so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT
Shame on the naysayers. The System Idle Processes really do hog the CPU at unpredictable times. They completely disabled my computer while I was trying to a) allow internet access on Norton Internet Security b) access the Task Manager c) access Google on Internet Explorer, which was already on the screen. None of these applications use the CPU intensively, but the System Idle Processes blocked usage for about 5 minutes.
The name is totally misleading. These processes DO NOT RUN WHILE THE SYSTEM IS IDLE. Often it happens a few minutes after boot up or after returning from Stand By, EXACTLY WHEN THE COMPUTER USER NEEDS THE CPU MOST.