CPU Usage question

Recently I've been monitoring my computer resource and I notice something. Second Life uses a HUGE amount of CPU usage. Just standing around an empty sim it uses nearly 90/95% of my cpu.

My cpu is a Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0Ghz it just seems very odd that is using so much cpu for just standing around.

I am just wondering if this is just normal for people or if something wrong.

It's totally normal. SL will always utilize as much power as it can get its hands on. CPU usage should be 100%, or very close to it, whenever SL is running. So don't worry; nothing's wrong.

Haha how come I don't feel better? xD

They should work on that hehe well thank I suppose.

Why? It doesn't cause any problems. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

It's not like it will interfere with other applications. It just grabs whatever is available. That's all.

If you've got nothing else running, then SL will use 100% of everything. If you do have any other programs running, then SL will use 100% of whatever those others aren't using at the moment.

The alternative would be to throttle SL with some arbitrary percentage cap, which would only slow it down. There wouldn't be any benefit in that at all. Its not like your CPU cares how hard it's working. It's just as happy whether it's being used 100% or 50% or 5% or whatever. Don't worry; it won't run out of gas.

Power saving? Temps? Longevity of various components through said lower temps?

Unless you're on a laptop or live in Houston.
Overheating reduces the lifespan of your laptop, or your lap of you keep your laptop on your lap, and increases your air conditioning bills.

I wish I could tell SL to throttle itself to 3FPS when I'm being idly.

Underclock your computer's CPU or get a better CPU cooler.

Although I don't believe either is necessary on a desktop. The stock Intel CPU fan keeps the very overclocked CPU in my PC cool enough. If I do manage to burn out the CPU, I'll get a newer, faster one.

It does seem a little odd that SL would use that much CPU running idle. Just grabbing things out of the air, I'm wondering if it's possible that the CPU is throttling down (modern CPUs do that when they aren't busy), and it's running a higher percentage of the lower clock speed?

In a laptop?

It's rendering 20 or 30 or 60 frames per second whether you're standing there staring at a wall or dancing the night away in The Edge.

When it has less to do it just cranks up the FPS.

Hence my desire to be able to put a "rev limiter" on the thing, so I can say "no more than 30 FPS no matter what", or "no more than 3 FPS" if that's how I roll.

I'm pretty sure there's software that can control a CPU's speed. For a laptop, get one of those cooling pad things people are always recommending.

If you're idle, just flip SL to the background.

Which will throttle SL whether you need the CPU power or not. You'll get 20 FPS and a cool CPU when you're staring at a wall, but you'll get 2 FPS instead of 20 FPS when you actually need that horsepower. It will also reduce the CPU available to anything else you're running on your computer... whether that's Photoshop or a second instance of SL.

Linden Labs discovered that letting the sims yield CPU instead of cranking the physics frame rate over 45 FPS was advantageous... well, the same thing applies to the client.
Been there done that wasted my money.

"Not being in a sim with 40 dancing avatars covered in bling" is not the same as "idle".

Well as I said I am in a empty sim - other then builds in a build box and I notice SL using all the cpu. I just wasn't sure if it should be doing that. I suppose it normal and yeah I am on a desktop most the time.

Well, it depends on the meaning of "should". It shouldn't be programmed such that it uses up all CPU time, but the way it's programmed makes that normal.

I hate to say it, but if your laptop overheats just because the CPU is being used 100%, well, you simply shouldn't own that laptop. Get one with a better cooling system.

In a desktop, it shouldn't even be an issue at all. If it is, just get a better CPU fan.

Oh, the manufacturer insists that it's not overheating. They all do. It's to their advantage to have my laptop fail once the warranty runs out.

I'll repeat, if your laptop overheats just because the CPU is being used 100%, you simply shouldn't own that laptop. Get one with a better cooling system. There are plenty on the market that are up to the task.

You can buy a cheapo that you'll have to replace in a year because it breaks, or you can buy a better one for 4 times more that won't break, and you'll replace it only when it's too old to run current software anymore, after 4 years. Either way, you're spending the same amount of money. You might as well get the highest quality you can, right from the start, and enjoy the experience the whole time, rather than worrying about how not to break a piece of junk that is designed to break no matter what.

I think you missed my point.

I don't expect to throw away my laptop when Applecare runs out, therefore I don't allow it to run as hot as Apple thinks it should be allowed to run.

When I had a Thinkpad, I didn't run it as hot as IBM thought it should be run. If I got another Thinkpad, I wouldn't run it as hot as Lenovo thinks it should be run.

If I had a VAIO, I wouldn't run it as hot as Sony thinks it should be run.

If I had a Dell... well, I wouldn't have a Dell, so that's beside the point.

I can't afford to buy a cheap laptop. I can't afford to NOT take care of my expensive laptop.

I think you missed my point as well, Argent. Get a machine with an adequate cooling system and you'll never have to worry about overdoing it. If you've already got that, then you're just being unduly cautious.

You want to know how many laptops I've ever burned out from excessive use? Exactly zero. Heck, my old Compaq from 1998 still works just fine, and I've run that CPU to Hell and back.

There's an old saying. An airplane will rot faster on the ground than it will in the air. Besides, an airplane is meant to fly.

What's the point in buying a high end machine if you're afraid to use it for high end purposes? If you had a Ferrari would you just drive it 20 miles per hour to church on Sundays? I certainly hope not. Get that thing out on the highway, and let 'er rip.

I'm being reasonably cautious. Laptops are not expected to run at 100% CPU for extended periods. Cheap laptops have a negative safety margin when you do that. Good ones "merely" have a whisker-thin one... because they're designed to have an "acceptable" failure rate within the warranty period.
The older your laptop the more margin it has for overheating. Newer processors run faster and are built to a smaller scale so take less electromigration to turn into expensive sand.
An airplane that's kept flying at the limits of its safety margins won't have time to rot.
No, but I wouldn't burn rubber at every stop-light either, and that's what SL is doing by running the FPS up to 60 when you don't need it over 30, or running it up to 30 when you're in IM and only need 10.

We'll have to agree to disagree, I guess. Clearly neither one of us is going to change our mind on this.

If you want to keep the Ferrari analogy going, though, a Ferrari operates most efficiently at well over 100 miles per hour. Driving it any slower than that will cause more wear and tear than driving it at its intended speed.

Turn it back up when you feel the need for speed.

I suppose a throttle setting for SL would be ideal, but short of that, you can limit your CPU for times you'd prefer not to have it running wide open for no good reason.

To me it doesn't matter if we're talking laptop or desktop - Why have an application that even when doing very little still sucks up all available resources?

Maybe I don't want my CPU fan to be spinning faster than necessary (no matter what fan you have, the lifespan is still revolution dependent), or to have so much air flowing through my case I can barely hear myself think just to keep the internal temps down. A CPU at full pelt will be warmer than one that isn't, and that heat will be raising the temp of every component. Even if I compromise between noise levels and ideal temps and keep everything below manufacturer spec, the warmer something runs the less long it will function.

Underclocking isn't an option, why should I either run a flakey utility to try and do it on the fly, or have to manually keep adjusting things depending on what I want to do?

And aside from all that, why with everything as standard, should I be pumping extra heat into a room and sucking more electricity just to maybe stand around in SL chatting in IMs?

Oh, and laptop cooler pads - Tend to be most useful for laptops where the rubber feet have fallen off over time, and/ or the radiator has started to clog up. Stripping the heatpipe asembly out and giving it a good clean helps keep temps down a little

Why would I want to do a damnfool thing like that?
Digital electronic components, however, don't "wear out faster" if you run them slower than 100% of rated max. The hotter they are, the faster they wear out, this is uncontroversial. You may consider that I am too conservative, but you can't contradict the fact that all other things being equal, running a system cooler will increase its expected lifespan.

Since there is no downside to throttling FPS and running SL at less than 100% of the available frame rate, what exactly are you trying to accomplish by belittling my digital phallus? I don't mind having a smaller clock than you, I'm just pointing out that a benefit (however derisory you consider it) of throttling SL.

We a little off the main question here?

I have a quad core something or another, and cpu doenst run close to 100 percent....now i know we aren't talking apples to apples, but if I were to change the affinity to 1 core, i'm still not running at 100 percent....so what is causing the cpu to work overtime?? Could it be memory? Could it be video card? Could it be hard drive? Could it be a crapload of other programs running in the background? Seriously, even my intel celeron at work doesnt run 100 percent on the cpu, and it has a gig of memory....

Sure, an FPS limiter in SL would come in handy, however, I understand the programmers have more important projects at the moment ( ). There are alternatives if you're worried about burning up your computer.

I don't believe Second Life does use all available resources. At least not on every computer. I've been watching the task manager, and it rarely gets over 70% on my PC. It's gone up to 100% CPU use, but that's the exception, not the rule.

Argent, I thought we had agreed to disagree. That didn't fly for you, huh? I guess I did open the box by throwing out the Ferrari thing after I'd offered to agree to disagree. That was a mistake. OK, I've got a little more left before I declare this debate pointless.



If one were to argue for the sake of arguing, one could find an argument to be had with this point. I don't necessarily agree, but here's how the logic might go:

If you leave an electronic component completely unused, it will simply rot like anything else, as its various components corrode. The flow of electricity through circuitry can and does prevent oxidation of conductive materials. Therefore, SOME degree of steady usage will make an electronic device last longer than no usage at all. Carry that to the next logical step, and it's not inconceivable that constant full throttle usage will keep a device in better shape than intermittent limited usage.

We see analogous behavior all the time in mechanical devices like cars. Stop and go city driving kills a vehicle MUCH faster than steady highway driving.

A processor is an electronic device, but it is also very much a mechanical device. It's full of thousands of tiny switches. I'm not sure anyone really knows whether these switches will break down faster through the mechanical wear and tear of flipping on and off constantly, or through corrosion from sitting idle. There are theoretical arguments that could be had in both directions.

Feel free to agree, disagree, or simply ignore all this so far. It's just a silly logical exercise, and not even a terribly good one, meant mainly to show the futility of continuing to argue about this.


So, silly-logic aside, here's what I'll now say on the subject from a more practical standpoint. Hopefully this will be the point we can agree to disagree on.

Even if the constant full usage of a CPU will wear it out faster than more moderate use, I don't believe for a second that that wear and tear could possibly shorten the processor's lifespan so dramatically as to cause it to fail before it simply becomes obsolete. That's the only point that's really important, as far as I'm concerned.

The simple fact is by the time my 3 year warranty on my laptop is up, it will be time to upgrade to a new one, no matter whether the old one is physically on its last legs or not. So what would be the point in lessening my enjoyment of it in order to make it last longer physically? I'd much rather continue to drive it at 100MPH across the finish line than Sunday-drive to the same inevitable destination.




I'm not sure I can fully agree with that. If a device is heated beyond its safety margin, then sure, it will wear out prematurely. But as long as it's kept within its design limits, it will just run and run and run.

But again, even if you're right that every degree of heat lessens the lifespan, you'll never convince me that any amount of heat within the design threshold will lessen it so much that the device will fail before it's obsolete.

Fact, any laptop older than 3-4 years is a relative dinosaur. Operating systems and programs continue to evolve at an every increasing pace, and only get more and more power hungry. Desktops tend to get upgraded little by little along the way, so they're easier to keep current. Laptops are closed systems, which need to be replaced every few years no matter what. Barring defects, CPU's last longer than that 3-4 years, no matter how much you use them, as long as you don't overheat them.



For all practical purposes, I just did. Running a laptop cooler won't make it any more usable in 3-4 years than running it hot the whole time. Obsolescence is obsolescence.




Excuse me, what? Now I KNOW you're arguing just to argue. With all due respect to you and your self-anointed giant pillar of virtual masculinity, please don't go there again.




I don't think it's a significant enough benefit, if it's even a benefit at all, to bother with.






Why not? There's no harm in it, as I've been trying to point out, between the "digital phallus" remarks.



Realistically, do you know how long it would take to kill a CPU fan just by letting it spin? Seriously, it could take centuries. I've personally never seen a fan die, be it a CPU fan, a house fan, an automobile engine fan, or any other type. I'm sure they do fail from time to time, just like all mechanical devices, but it's an exceedingly rare occurrence.

And as for noise, I can't help but point out the obvious. If your fan is really so loud you can't hear yourself think, get a quieter fan. That's kind of a no-brainer, isn't it?

I recommend Zaalman 9500's. They're very, very quiet, and their heat dissipation is phenomenal. My system temps dropped a full 10 degrees, across the board, when I switched from a (very expensive) liquid cooling system to my Zaalman, and the noise level dropped too, as the Zaalman turned out to be infinitely quieter than the radiator fan on the liquid system. Total win-win.



Technically yes, but not by much. By the time you get more than a millimeter or so from the surface of the fan motor chassis, you're talking about fractions of a degree.

If you want to argue that the heat coming off the processor itself, and dissipating off the heat pipes that connect to the fan, or even the exhaust blowing out FROM the fan, if not aimed properly out an exhaust port, can all serve to raise the temperature of the interior space inside a case, fine. But to argue that the heat from the fan motor itself is in any way a significant effector of the temperature is more than a little silly.



Again, get a quieter fan, and you won't have to compromise at all. In any case, I take issue with the notion that just because something is warm, it's destined to die sooner. As long as it's within the design threshold, it will be fine for the practical lifespan of the computer. It's only when things start to overheat that there's a problem. There's a big difference between ordinary operational heat and overheat.



Agreed. Kind of beside the point, but agreed.



Maybe, maybe not. But the differences you're talking about are really negligible. So there's not much point in worrying about it.

Want some examples to prove it? I'll give you a great one, my office.

The presence of the computers in my office causes that room to be a good 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house, at all times. I've got central A/C, but I also keep a secondary portable air conditioner in the office, for when the heat gets too excessive. I monitor the room temperature pretty closely, since I actually have a pretty severe heat-related medical condition. If I spend too much time in a room that is too hot, my system starts to shut down, and I could literally die within hours if I'm unable to cool my body in time. It's the lingering aftermath of a heat stroke I suffered about 10 years ago, during which my body's internal temperature regulation ability was partially destroyed. So as you can imagine, the subject of heat output from computers (and from everything else) is not one I take lightly.

Want to know how hot the room is with the secondary A/C off, and the computers idle? About 80 degrees, usually. Want to know how hot it is with the secondary A/C off and my main computer running full throttle all day long? Still about 80 degrees, usually. It only starts to creep above 80 when the temperature outside climbs above the low 70's. Otherwise, that 80 degree mark is quite steady.

What heats up the room that extra 10 degrees above the rest of the house is the fact that the computers are on at all. The amount of CPU usage at any given time makes no measurable difference whatsoever.

The same is true for electricity as well. Since I work freelance, there are times when I'm working 8-16 hours per day for weeks, and other times when I've got almost no work at all. When work is slow, I'm not in SL very much. I still use my computers, but my CPU usage is practically nonexistent, compared to when I'm working. My electric bill remains pretty constant, however.

Surely, if CPU usage were a major factor in power consumption, then there would be a significant spike in my electric bill in months when I've had a lot of work. But that spike just isn't there.

I know what you're thinking. I probably watch more TV or something when I'm not working, and that's what evens out the cost, right? Wrong. I have a TV in my office, which is ALWAYS on when I'm working. It's a habit I've had since childhood. For some reason I concentrate better when the TV is on than when it's not. On the rare occasions that I don't turn it on, I don't get nearly as much done. Somehow I procrastinate more when my shows and movies aren't going. I've never understood why.

And beyond computers and TV's, there's not much else I really use discretionary electricity for. I do have a woodshop full of power tools, but I only ever get in there to work on things a few days a month. Other than that, there's really nothing.

Bottom line, CPU usage doesn't change ambient room temperature or household electricity usage in any statistically significant way.




In any case, one thing we all seem to keep ignoring is the fact that SL is hardly the only program to exhibit this behavior. Most video games do exactly the same thing. Should we be discussing throttling them as well?