High processor usage?

I'm curious as to the high processor usage of SL. While I'm typing this SL is running in a roughly 800x600 window. It's been idle for a few minutes and I'm just looking at a hill with little geometry around me. I've got most graphics options off as I'm running a GeForce 2 MX 400 64MB card. What suprises me is that SL uses all the processor time it has available - what's it doing? The bandwidth meter was virtually off yet SL was chugging away. I'm curious because I run folding@home and assumed that if I wasn't doing anything in SL that was graphics intensive, it wouldn't hog the processor time. What's up with this? BTW I'm running a single Opteron 240.

SL isn't throttled, meaning it tries to process frames as fast as it can, no matter what's in the scene - if you'd brought up the stats window (Alt+1 I think) you'd have seen that your FPS was... er... very high.

It'll basically be spooling relevant data to the video card - the CPU has to do alot of work in SL working out what geometry to send to the GPU for rendering.
There's a data display somewhere (Alt+3 or something like it) that shows the amount of tme SL apperars to be doing various tasks.

so there's nothing to be done when newview is using 98% of the cpu cycles and slowing the machines other tasks to a crawl?

In Microsot Windows, open the task manager (right-click the task bar and select Task Manager), find the process named "newview.exe", then right-click it and set it's Task Priority to "BelowNormal".

That will allow other programs to run smoothly while SL is running.

In Apple Macintosh OS X, I'm not sure what to do or if it is a problem.

thanks hank!

If you minimize SL, it will behave itself and stop eating so many cycles, so you can still use other programs this way. But, if you haven't got alot of RAM, you might find that performance still suffers with SL minimized.

And not just when minimized for me - I've got 512MB and it takes about 3 mins for anything else to run after QUITTING SL, not just minimising it!

Thanks, Hank! I'll have to try that trick out.

Freya, you might want to check out SysInternals' PageDefrag. It's possible that your pagefile is just really fragmented. SL should close pretty much instantaneously.

Wow this tip really helped me out , thanks!