Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

iTunes pegged my CPU at over 130%? | 7 Comments

Posted in Apple on 4th October 2006, 11:50 pm by

Today whilst I was working I noticed that my system (a MacBook Pro) had slowed to a crawl. To investigate I ran top from the terminal only to see this:

top command showing iTunes using 120.4% of the CPU

I then noticed the following dialogue when I switched to iTunes:

Optimizing Photos for ipod dialogue

iTunes was updating my iPod with the few thousand pics I had dumped into iPhoto on the weekend and this had caused iTunes to work overtime to sync the photos across. What I’m interested to know is, how do you get more than 100% out of a CPU? Or is this some strange byproduct of the dual core intel? Answers on a postcard…

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  • http://feaverish.com Feaverish

    With two cores (or processors) you can get up to 200%. A lot of system monitors (MenuMeters, et al.) average the processor loads and only output up to 100% (which would mean both cores are pegged at 100%, for 200% total).

  • http://macintalk.com Mackie

    Apparently with dual processors you can go up to 200%. I found this out after I bought my first dual processor Mac four years ago, and imported lots of things at once in iTunes.

  • http://wait-till-i.com Chris Heilmann

    My guess is that the CPU blushed at the sight of what you store on the iPod. This caused more heating and the system read this as more processing. That’s where the wrong number came from.

  • Johan M

    The CPU load maximum is per processor (or core). Since your MacBook Pro has two cores, the maximum is 200%.

  • http://de-online.co.uk David Emery

    As you’ve got a dual processor system, and iTunes is multi-threded, the number can indeed go above 100% – you have 200% to play with.

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Feaverish, Mackie, Johan, David: Had to be didn’t it. Though it would be nice if top reported only up to 100% for a dual core CPU as that would make more sense imho.

    @Christian: Quite probably!

  • Mark

    I have a single core processor (G3 800MHz), and I’m seeing top reporting iTunes using CPU of up to 124%. this is with OSX 10.4. Any ideas why that would be?

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory|(1)

A nice trick for having screen open a new tab in the same directory as the one you’re currently in. To use it add it to your .screenrc

# Open new window in current dir.
bind c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"
bind ^c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"

Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

Ubuntu: add-apt-repository: command not found|(3)

When you’re using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the ‘add-apt-repository’ command is missing (it’s useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Photos on Flickr

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