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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.
Many operating systems, for example Windows, [1] Linux, [2] and macOS [3] will run an idle task, which is a special task loaded by the OS scheduler on a CPU when there is nothing for the CPU to do. The idle task can be hard-coded into the scheduler, or it can be implemented as a separate task with the lowest possible priority.
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.
Establishing that a computer is frequently CPU-bound implies that upgrading the CPU or optimizing code will improve the overall computer performance. With the advent of multiple buses, parallel processing, multiprogramming , preemptive scheduling, advanced graphics cards , advanced sound cards and generally, more decentralized loads, it became ...
Thrashing is when the CPU performs 'productive' work less and 'swapping' work more. The overall memory access time may increase since the higher level memory is only as fast as the next lower level in the memory hierarchy. [2] The CPU is busy swapping pages so much that it cannot respond to users' programs and interrupts as much as required.
As other resources are also shared, processor affinity alone cannot be used as the basis for CPU dispatching. If a process has recently run on one virtual hyper-threaded CPU in a given core, and that virtual CPU is currently busy but its partner CPU is not, cache affinity would suggest that the process should be dispatched to the idle partner CPU.
A 3 GHz model of the Intel Pentium 4 processor that incorporates Hyper-Threading Technology [7]. Hyper-Threading Technology is a form of simultaneous multithreading technology introduced by Intel, while the concept behind the technology has been patented by Sun Microsystems.
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.