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100% CPU Usage?
Raggaholic
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I was just wondering how common 100% CPU Usage was. I'm monitoring mine through the task manager, and I hit (and stay at) 100% rather often. It will always spike when opening a video, starting a program, or converting a video with TMPGEnc.
I've checked through google and it seems like this is a bad thing. It slows the machine down sure, but I never thought it was too much of a problem.
Am I wrong?
I've checked through google and it seems like this is a bad thing. It slows the machine down sure, but I never thought it was too much of a problem.
Am I wrong?
Raggaholic on
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You may try updating your virus scanner and running a scan. Check for spyware also. For spyware I like Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware. If you think you might have some spyware, I would recommend running multiple scanners. Just one probably wont find everything.
EDIT: Also you might want to look at your running processes (from the Processes tab in Task Manager) and sort everything by CPU usage. Maybe you could narrow down what is hogging all your CPU cycles.
Also, sorting your processes by cpu usage is the best way to find out what's taking it all up. Just CTRL ALT DEL, click the PROCESSES tab and click on "CPU" twice (one to sort it ascending, another to sort it decending).
When you do find some process that eats up CPU time when Idle then google its name to find out what it does.
At night, the ice weasels come."
The only time it won't get to 100% is when the act is so simple that before it can reach 100% use, it's already done.
Like, if you notice when opening Firefox it goes to 100% CPU usage, and then throttles way down once it's actually open? Stuff like that.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7V266-E Motherboard
1GB DDR SDRAM
nVidia Geforece4 TI4200 (128MB)
XP Pro, Service Pack 2
Yeah, I know this machine is older but I've noticed that it's been performing worse and worse over the past few months. I basically just use it for video editing and whatnot.
There aren't any issues with adware/spyware. I ran scans, and they came up clean.
I would recommend using the windows 98 theme, as it helps load up windows a bit quicker in my experience, and I would also go thru every inch of my harddrive and take off any programs I dont use, and defrag right afterwards. Then I'd go into my C drive and eliminate any folders and such that have been left behind by previously downloaded/uninstalled programs. This shoul help with harddrive space as well as keeping background tasks to a minimum.
Also like everyone has said, defrag it, and clean up as much crap as you can.
But if it hits 100% while idling, you might have a problem. rtvscan.exe and hlpsrvc.exe are a couple that tend to do shit like that. If so, just kill em with task manager.
At night, the ice weasels come."
I do use the Win98 theme on all of my machines, as I just prefer it to the XP theme. I thought about reformatting (I just did that around two months ago with my gaming machine), but it's going to be a pain with everything I have on it. If anything, that's my dead last option.
Defragging now...
I've noticed that CPU usage will go to 99 when I'm using a video file, though. If I'm playing one, then the player will take up 99 of the CPU. If I try to skip around in a video, it will be at 99 and then delay a few seconds before moving. The same thing happens if I'm editing a video file.
This doesn't happen with audio files.
That's... normal. Your system idle process doesn't actually utilize cpu power, it's just letting you know that your system is X% idle.
As for playing videos taking up 99% of the CPU, it seems like you have your player set up incorrectly, or your video card sucks, because your video card should be doing the majority of the video playback work and your CPU shouldn't be anywhere near 100%. Install new video drivers and make sure all the "Hardware Acceleration" checkboxes are checked in your video player's setup menu.
Video card sucks as in "time for an upgrade" or video card sucks as "there is something wrong with your card?" I'm using a Geforce4 TI 4200, and I know in the "I need to play [x game] on high" world of computers, it lags behind. I figured it would be more than fine for what I was doing, though.
I upgraded to nvidia's latest drivers and looking in the video player options, there is no hardware acceleration boxes. I'm using Windows Media Player Classic.
These videos are ripped from DVDs pretty much. It does do the same thing with randomly downloaded videos and videos captured directly from my VCR. It's happening with various types of videos and various types of encoding as well.
I have another AGP card. I think I'll swap them out to see if that makes anything better.
Everything you've posted sounds completely normal. Your computer is just slow as shit. Everyone getting you to analyze what your system is doing is overlooking the fact that you're about 5 YEARS and several generations of technology behind the curve.
The Athlon XP 2000+ is most likely based on the Palomino core, built with a 180nm process. That's 3 generations of CPU lithography advancements behind what's available on today's CPUs. It runs at 1.67Ghz and only has 256kb L2 cache and no on-die memory controller. Also, your motherboard only supports up to PC2100 RAM. The slowest you can even find anymore is PC3200.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with your computer other than the fact that it's bordering on ancient. I mean, Max Payne and Halo came out when your system was considered 'new'. And encoding video is a very CPU intensive process. Forget trying to encode new formats like h.264 on that thing. It'll take you days.
And your video card has absolutely NOTHING to do with video playback. It's solely for rendering 3d games. Hardware accelerated video decoding wasn't added until after the Nvidia 6xxx series of cards with PureVideo came out, years after your card came out. Ignore people telling you to upgrade your drivers because that will do nothing. Your CPU is what decodes all videos on your PC.
You should ask in Games and Technology next time to make sure you get accurate information.
This is completely wrong.
For instance, it used to be (and I mean six months back) I could take a MPEG and turn it into a Video folder for a DVD in around thirteen minutes. Now it takes almost an hour. I used to be able to point to a spot on a video and it play instantly, now there is a three to four second delay. I used to be able to watch a video without it stuttering and playing fast in some spots. Now I can't.
If it's a "old machine" issue, that's one thing. I want to make sure that's the issue before moving on, though.
I thought about reformatting/reinstalling Windows, but wanted to avoid it because it's going to be a hassle. If Windows does sludge over time, then that may end up being the only option.
It's been at least two years running constantly (not 24/7, but almost) and my space changes a lot. As of right now, I'm at about 80% capacity, but that can go as low as 30% and as high as 95%.
Looks like I know what I have to do...
Free drive space only becomes a performance issue with Windows when you get under 1GB. It's possible your virtual memory allocation has become fragmented, but there's not a whole lot you can do about that short of giving it it's own partition. You could however, disable virtual memory, then defrag your drive, then turn VM back on again where it will then take a chunk of the empty non-fragmented drive space. But I can pretty much guaranatee that won't be a 100% solution to your problem.
Wow dude. Wow. You don't know what you're talking about.
I refer you here and here and here.
If you don't feel like visiting those links, this information was pulled from spec sheets referring specifically to the Geforce 4 ti series chips:
It might also suprise you to see "2D" hardware features listed, since everything you see on your monitor is accelerated by the graphics card, provided you have the drivers loaded. It's no new feature; graphics cards have been graphically outperforming CPUs for over a decade.
So, if his drivers weren't correctly installed, or the settings were incorrect, his CPU WOULD have been processing every single frame of video, hence the 100% usage. Otherwise, the CPU would be merely feeding the graphics chip the frame data and the chip would decode it, scale it, color correct it, deinterlace it and display it on screen.
Edit: Oh yeah.
The standard features of motion compensation, scaling and deinterlacing remove a huge burden from the main processor and improve the image quality greatly versus standard software decoding.
HD transport streams with MPEG 1 and 2? What? Neither MPEG 1 nor standard Mpeg 2 are HD formats, so HD doesn't even factor in to the equation. There is an HD MPEG 2 format which is the same as the original but is capable of HD resolutions through codec extensions, but I've never seen it on the computer. As I understand, it's primarily used in HDTV set top boxes.
MPEG 1 and 2 are nowhere near "on the way out." DVD video = MPEG 2, so unless they're completely phasing out all standard DVDs, we're going to see MPEG 1 and 2 in use for quite some time. In fact, MPEG 2 popularity is still increasing, because it's a superior format. DivX comes close, but it doesn't have the same level of support that MPEG 2 does
I highly doubt he's working with HD videos all day long. In fact, from what it seems, he's doing conversions from AVI to MPEG 1.
In addition to all that, the whole point of hardware motion compensation and scaling is to improve the video quality of the videos played. For example:
Here is an MPEG1 file played in software mode:
Here is the same MPEG1 file played in hardware mode:
Note how the software mode is jaggy and has huge discernable pixels everywhere. That's because the process of filtering and improving the picture quality is an arduous one, something that's better left to the graphics accelerators.
AVIVO and PureVideo are nothing more than unnecessary marketing hype. His video card is perfectly capable of dealing with the streams he's giving it, and it's perfectly capable of accelerating other forms of video.
I got a little sidetracked with this lesson in graphics cards, so I missed the "Windows Sludge" effect, which is correct. OP, I responded to your PM. Basically, if you have installed and uninstalled lots of software, your system gets bogged down easily and will be slow regardless of drivers or system age. Reformatting is the best option in this case, but sometimes a simple defrag can help.