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'System Idle Process'

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iancom:
Really, the System Idle Process is nothing at all to worry about - it's completely normal in Windows. Here's a screenshot of my Windows 2000 Task List

Notice that the System Idle Process is taking up most of my CPU time (because the CPU is doing nothing else - it can't do NOTHING, so it has to run an idle process). It also has a PID (process ID) of 0, so you know it really is the genuine thing.

To contrast, here is a shot of my
Linux Top Command
Notice that this does not actually list the idle process in with the other tasks, but it is still there - near the top and to the right "99.2% idle".

So, don't worry about the System Idle process but do uninstall FindFast!

[ April 25, 2002: Message edited by: IanC ]

Calum:
what do you mean it can't do nothing? what happens when you select "idle process" and click the button to exit the process? is it a process or not? if not, it should not be on the process list.

iancom:
I did try killing it for a laugh... wouldn't let me :-(

Of course the processor *can* do nothing, but operating systems tend to work on the principle that the processor is always doing something and treat idle time as a process in itself. I don't know enough about the really deep inner workings of kernels and so on to explain exactly why they do this... it's something to do with the bus having to deliver signals to the processor whether there's anything in the work queue or not so the OS generates an idle (blank) work packet to be sent.

Or something like that!

iancom:
This has got me intruiged now, so if anyone's interested this is how the Linux kernel deals with the idle process...


--- Code: ---
--- End code ---

Basically it's a very minimal process whose only function is to check if anything else wants to use the processor and if it does, give way to it, otherwise keep looping...

If you think about it, the processor could never be doing nothing otherwise there would be no mechanism to fork another process on demand. Fascinating  

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