| Computer Desktop Encyclopedia: System Idle Process |
An option in the Windows XP Task Manager that indicates what percentage of time the CPU is currently doing nothing but waiting for work. If no applications are running that the user is aware of (although there may always be some tasks running in the background), the percentage can be in the high 90s.
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| 5min Related Video: System Idle Process |
| Wikipedia: System Idle Process |
| System Idle Process A component of Microsoft Windows |
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| Details | |
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| Type | Kernel |
| Included with | Windows NT |
In Windows NT operating systems, the System Idle Process contains one or more kernel threads which run when no other runnable thread can be scheduled on a CPU. For example, there may be no runnable thread in the system, or all runnable threads are already running on a different CPU. In a multiprocessor system, there is one idle thread associated with each CPU.
The threads in the System Idle Process are used by Windows NT to implement CPU power saving. The exact power saving scheme depends on the hardware and firmware capabilities of the system in question. For instance, on x86 processors, the idle thread will run a loop of HLT instructions, which causes the CPU to turn off many internal components and wait until an interrupt request arrives.
The CPU time consumed by the System Idle Process is commonly of interest for end users, as it is a measure of the CPU utilization in their system which is easily accessible through Windows' Task Manager program. There are, however, more detailed sources of such information available through Windows' performance monitoring system (accessible with the perfmon program), which includes more finely grained categorization of CPU time spending. A limited subset of the CPU time categorization is also accessible through the Task Manager, which can display CPU usage by CPU, and categorized by time spent in user vs. kernel code. It should be noted, though, that that information is not calculated from information about the System Idle Process, but from the system's global performance counters.
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