(Untitled)

[wasteddream]

What the hell is a "system idle process", anyway, and why is it taking up 80 to 93 percent of my CPU?

It should not take twenty seconds for my machine to respond to a keystroke.

Urge to kill, rising.

Comments

[jon2]

It translates to "doing nothing". Meaning your CPU is spending 80 to 93% of its time not doing anything.

[evilcyber]

Which means that something else is slowing down your system. Check memory usage. An overall overusage will slow things down, as will a single process trying to actively use a lot of memory. (It will push other programs to swap, and thus take a long time for them to respond.)

Try rebooting.

Also, massively infected systems can exhibit this behavior.

[jon2]

Yeah, memory consumption would be my guess. Say you had Photoshop open, and inside Photoshop you had 10 pictures of midget porn that you had been retouching. That uses a lot of memory, and as soon as you try to switch to another application it might take a long time for it to respond as the contents of memory get pulled back in off the disk. So if you're still doing a lot of midget porn editing, you might want to add more memory - it's relatively cheap these days.

[hep]

try rebooting. if you continue to have the same problem and rebooting doesn't help and your process log shows normal stuff, you probably picked up an infection somewhere and it's hiding.

[structurefall]

being very low on hard drive space could cause behavior like this too. check that out.