Why your system is slow, even though the CPU is idle.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com
not long ago, I published an article about the system idle process and how it
is not a problem, even if it might be using 99 percent of your CPU.
I keep getting push back on it.
This is an example of that pushback.
"I understand Leo that in your article,
what is the system meital process and why is it using most of the CPU?
You are saying the system idle process or SIP is actually doing nothing.
But I, like several others,
do find that while we are using the computer so it is not idle,
all processing slows down and becomes sporadic.
When that happens, task manager shows only SIP using the CPU.
If SIP is not causing the slowdown, what is?"
I want to be clear. Many people,
because of this kind of a scenario, believe that system,
idle process is the cause of the slowdown, that it is somehow evil,
they are wrong system, idle process is actually a good thing.
It means that your CPU is ready to do more.
It is ready to go to work.
It is twiddling its digital thumbs, waiting for something to do.
Here's an example.
Let's go over to my Windows home machine and fire up the task manager.
And if you happen to see it like this,
with the more details being available, make sure to hit that.
And I'm going to go ahead and go over here to details.
And you'll see here we have several
different columns and several different programs running.
And if I click on the CPU column to sort it by that, you'll see that the system
idle process is number one at ninety nine or ninety eight percent of the CPU usage.
My system could still be slow.
Here's the trick.
While the CPU does the calculations
in your computer, it's often referred to as the brain of your computer.
It is not the only thing.
Most importantly, it is not the only thing that can affect your speed.
For example, the most common culprit
is your disk reading and writing data to and from your disk.
If you're doing, a lot of it can really slow you down.
And while that's happening, the CPU could be doing nothing.
What's it doing?
It's in the system, idle process,
waiting for the next chunk of data to be read from or written to the disk so
that it can move on and then do some calculations.
In other words, your CPU is mostly waiting
while something else is happening and it's usually disk activity.
Now, what can cause a lot of disk activity?
Well, of course, if your program is actually doing a lot
of reading and writing to the disk, by definition, that's disk activity.
And that could in fact, appear this way.
More commonly, or at least as commonly, is not enough
RAM.
In other words, if you're trying to do more with your computer than you have
the Ram to actually support, what happens is Windows itself will start
using some of your hard disk as if it were RAM.
And when that happens, well, we're back to the hard disk.
We're back to the CPU waiting most
of its time just for the hard disk to do whatever the hard disk is going to do.
And that's true whether it's a true hard disk or an SSD or something else.
The bottom line is that the CPU is not the only thing in your system.
It is not the only thing that can cause your system to be slow.
And while those other things, be they hard disks or networks or something else,
while they're hogging your machine,
while they're causing your system to be slow, your CPU is just waiting,
your CPU is just idle, and the idle process at the top of the CPU
usage list is what tells you that. It's not a bad thing.
It's telling you that the CPU is waiting for something.
I hope that helps clarify a little bit about the system
idle process and why your system might still be slow. For updates,
for related links, for comments and more, visit Askleo.com/4338.I'm
Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.