Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

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

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

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…

Post Tools

Comments: Add yours

1. On October 5th, 2006 at 2:32 am Feaverish said:

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).

2. On October 5th, 2006 at 4:38 am Mackie said:

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.

3. On October 5th, 2006 at 7:11 am Chris Heilmann said:

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.

4. On October 5th, 2006 at 7:54 am Johan M said:

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

5. On October 5th, 2006 at 8:18 am David Emery said:

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.

6. On October 5th, 2006 at 8:58 am Stuart Colville said:

@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!

7. On October 18th, 2007 at 12:15 pm Mark said:

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?







XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>



Standalone mac battery charger|(0)

Got a spare mac battery? I’ve often wondered why up until now no-one’s produced a standalone charger so that you can charge batteries without having to plug them into the mac. Fortunately Fastmac.com have produced a standalone charger that allows you to do just that. and it’s compatible with iBooks, Powerbooks, macbooks and Macbook Pros. It’s also 110/200v. Exactly what I was looking for!

Django Admin Ominigraffle Stencil|(0)

Colleague Alex Lee has created a nice stencil for omingraffle with the Django Admin UI components, perfect for wireframing customised admin screens. For more details and to download the stencil see Alex’s Blog csensedesign.co.uk

Photos on Flickr

© Copyright 2004-08 Stuart Colville, all rights reserved. May contain traces of Muffin. Powered by WordPress. Hosting by 1&1 This page was baked in 1.418s.