help w/ Activity Monitor; "process" at 100%, but idle says 50%

I

inmsjxn

Registered
so i've been trying to figure out why this is happening. in the process list the app. says it's near 100%, but when you look at the graphs/numbers at the bottom it's only using approx. 50%. it's like this in every app. i've tried. it's like the system is totalling 50% on each processor as 100%. even the graphs seem to stay around 50% on each processor. does anyone know why this is, or more importantly how to fix it. i'm attaching a grab of the activity monitor, in this case i was using compressor.

thanks for any help you can give.
 

Attachments

  • grab1.jpg
    grab1.jpg
    70.8 KB · Views: 16
'compressord' is part of the Compressor installed by Final Cut Pro. Quit the process from the Activity Monitor and see what happens.
 
I'm afraid you may have misunderstood my question. compressor is what i want running at full speed. even though it says it's running at 98%. it's not. if you look at the bottom of the activity monitor you can see that 42% of the CPU is still idle. this number should be 0% or near 0% when compressor is running. in effect, compressor should be listed at closer to 200% rather than 100%. the math from the top "process list" doesn't match the numbers in the system stats/graphs at the bottom of the activity monitor.
 
You are right that the percents are different in the top and bottom sections. The top is the percent of a single CPU and so you could get a value there of 180% for instance. The lower is a percentage of the total resources available and will not go over 100%.

So how to make it go faster. My first question is if the program itself is multithreaded or not. If not you will never get more than 100% since it cannot run on more than one CPU at a time. Since this is part of Final Cut I am sure that Apple has it properly multithreaded. The simple question is there a setting in the program to limit how much compute time it is using up itself. A can imagine that if it was trying to aggressively use the CPU it could make interactive use choppy, so is there a "compress faster usability be damned setting".

Assuming that those configuration questions are out of the way all that is really left is the fact that you are not compute bound at the moment but IO bound. Are you reading this off a network file system or to and from the same disk? Do you have insufficient RAM and are swapping? Look at some of the other system features to try and identify the system deadlock.

Good luck!
 
It's clear that compressord is using both processors, since neither processor's graph is above 95%. So I'm not sure why it wouldn't be maxing out both of them.

Do you have your CPU usage set to "reduced" in the Energy Saver section of System Preferences? That could explain it.
 
i'm with mikuro, the graph shows it's using both processors equally (approx. 50%), which i interpret as it has the abiltiy to multithread. otherwise one would be at 100% and the other would be about 5-7% for system use.

i'm positive that it's not an I/O problem, but lurk's post reminded me i didn't post the specs of my machine.

dual 2.7, 4gb ram, 5.6tb xRaid on dual fibre channel. FCP studio 5, tiger, everything up to date.

i have the processors set to high in the "energy" setting. and there are no preferences anywhere i can find to "turn it up" any higher.

it's almost as if there's a glitch that tells the system when a program reachs 100% that's all there is, but in fact there's 200% available b/c it's dual proc.

to confirm something else lurk said. i don't need to multitask, i need compressor to run full speed and crank out a high quality mpg for dvd fast.

hoping someone out there can help. b/c compressor is unaccectably slow at encoding, and that's what i dropped $30K on this system for it to do.

thanks
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top