[Ti] CPU at 100%

[arjan.bos]

> hi Arjan,
> 
> here is what i got:
> Last login: Tue Feb 15 19:30:02 on ttyp1
> Welcome to Darwin!
> Samboukas-Mac:~ sambouka$ top -o time
>

Sam,
You're right. It's strange that Finder is eating so much resources (read-on):


> Processes:  77 total, 3 running, 74 sleeping... 270 threads  22:45:03
This is quite normal, to have only three processes running. One of them would be `top'.

> Load Avg:  1.82, 1.70, 1.73     CPU usage:  34.3% user, 65.7% sys, 0.0% idle
The load averages as I understand it, display the average number of processes that use your cpu over a given amount of time. The first one (1.82) is over the smallest amount of time, the last one (1.73) is over the longest period of time. I do not know by heart the periods it reports on.
1.73 is quite high for a desktop machine.

Also note that the CPU usage say 0.0% idle. This means obiously that all your cpu is being used by processes. It also means that whatever you want to do, you have to share your cpu resource with other contending processes. So this is a point of concern from a responsiveness angle.

> SharedLibs: num =  128, resident = 38.2M code, 3.01M data, 12.2M LinkEdit
> MemRegions: num = 12175, resident =  173M + 24.8M private,  172M shared
> PhysMem:   101M wired,  498M active,  411M inactive, 1012M used, 11.5M free
>From this I read that you have 1GByte RAM in your computer. Only 11.5 of it is free. 498MB is actively used by processes and 411MB was recently used by processes, but can be swapped out, or cleared. 
This seems to indicate that there is a process using quite a lot of memory...

> VM: 6.19G + 85.8M   86168(0) pageins, 14255(0) pageouts
... although the number of pageouts and pageins do not seem to confirm that. 
Did you reboot lately?

>   PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE VSIZE
>   831 Finder      60.5%  2:00:37   5   154   324  6.38M  33.0M  21.7M   156M
Here we find the culprit. Finder is using 60% of your cpu and has used more than two hours of your uptime using the cpu for itself. 

Something is very wrong here. Does it continue to burn cpu if you relaunch the Finder? If so you have to resort to the normal fixing routines like installing the combo-updater. Or maybe you have a third-party add-on, an applescript for a folder-action or something like that which is `stuck'. Or mayby you are creating (unintentionally) an archive of your root directory or another very-very large folder. You should really look into this.

The other processes look quite normal:

>   791 TechTool P   0.0% 22:53.31   6   128   377  12.2M  27.1M  38.9M   137M
I've never used TechTool Pro, so I can't tell you if this is normal. It used (almost) 23 minutes of your cpu-time. But since it's not running currently, it looks quite normal.

>   204 WindowServ   4.2% 20:05.99   3   448   802  9.20M+ 66.0M  67.0M+  178M+
This process does the display things, the aqua extreme things on your computer. Everything that changes on the screen is drawn by (or through) this process. If you move a window, you should see a spike here.

>  1474 firefox-bi   2.1% 19:04.79  12   201   388  27.2M  40.0M  59.4M   336M
All those moving web-content makes firefox use some cpu. Nothing to worry about.
>  1488 Activity M   3.2% 11:27.45   5   101   214  5.34M  19.7M  21.2M   135M
>     0 kernel_tas   0.5% 11:05.34  36     2  2826  21.5M+    0K  86.4M+  827M+
>   839 VolumeOpti   0.0% 10:48.70   1    23    70   548K  1.59M  5.77M  61.1M
>   388 MSN Messen   2.1%  7:46.22   8   203   309  5.60M  25.8M  22.7M   146M
>   361 SystemUISe   1.6%  6:51.10   3   224   362  3.88M  23.8M  24.9M+  145M
>  1489 pmTool       2.6%  5:25.83   1    21    24   488K   436K   648K+ 27.1M
>   445 Microsoft    0.0%  2:45.74   7   294   382  20.5M  37.1M  46.4M   242M
>   862 Installer    0.0%  1:59.53   7   129   251  8.22M  20.5M  28.0M   163M
>   390 MSN Messen   1.6%  1:54.13   8   103   142  2.91M  7.16M  13.7M   108M
>   412 LaunchBar    0.0%  1:33.86   3    97   256  6.46M  21.2M  17.5M   138M
>   423 Mail         0.0%  1:07.02  13   349   397  7.30M  39.8M  32.9M   165M
>
> I dont understand why finder is using so many resources.
>
> Sam

HTH,
Arjan