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Idle is a state that a computer processor is in when it is not being used by any program. Every program or task that runs on a computer system occupies a certain amount of processing time on the CPU. If the CPU has completed all tasks it is idle. Modern processors use idle time to save power.
However, the idle process does not use up computer resources (even when stated to be running at a high percent). Its CPU time "usage" is a measure of how much CPU time is not being used by other threads. In Windows 2000 and later the threads in the System Idle Process are also used to implement CPU power saving.
CPU time (or process time) is the amount of time that a central processing unit (CPU) was used for processing instructions of a computer program or operating system. CPU time is measured in clock ticks or seconds. Sometimes it is useful to convert CPU time into a percentage of the CPU capacity, giving the CPU usage.
An idle computer has a load number of 0 (the idle process is not counted). Each process using or waiting for CPU (the ready queue or run queue) increments the load number by 1. Each process that terminates decrements it by 1. Most UNIX systems count only processes in the running (on CPU) or runnable (waiting for CPU) states.
The first number is the total number of seconds the system has been up. The second number is how much of that time the machine has spent idle, in seconds. [16] On multi-core systems (and some Linux versions) the second number is the sum of the idle time accumulated by each CPU. [17]
Other processes can use the CPU while the caller is blocked. The scheduler is given the information needed to implement priority inheritance or other mechanisms to avoid starvation. Busy-waiting itself can be made much less wasteful by using a delay function (e.g., sleep()) found in most operating systems. This puts a thread to sleep for a ...
In many applications, the CPU and other components are idle much of the time, so idle power contributes significantly to overall system power usage. When the CPU uses power management features to reduce energy use, other components, such as the motherboard and chipset, take up a larger proportion of the computer's energy.
The power measurement is often the average power used while running the benchmark, but other measures of power usage may be employed (e.g. peak power, idle power). For example, the early UNIVAC I computer performed approximately 0.015 operations per watt-second (performing 1,905 operations per second (OPS), while consuming 125 kW).