Recently installed retail version of Vista Ultimate 64 bit on my Compaq
laptop with AMD 3700+ processor. Had been running betas and releases
cadidates, most recently, RC2 5744 previously. Am experiencing one
troublesome problem while browsing the internet, that being the processor
randomly going to 100% usage and the browser returning no information.
Processor stays at 100% and the only way I have found to stop it is to use
task manager to cancel the entire browser process. This has happened using
both IE7 and Firefox. It was also happening in RC2. Seems a minor complaint
when compared to some others reported on the newsgroup and I consider myself
fortunate to be running fairly comfortably on two and one-half year old
hardware which has not been upgraded at all since new. Perhaps the widespread
reports of Vista worthlessness have been exaggerated. Anyone else
experiencing the 100% CPU problem I described?
Regardless what version of Windows you're running if CPU useage starts
creeping up and in time approaches 100% useage it usually means a
process (application or some internal happening Windows itself is
using to provide some function) is hung up. Normally if you open up
Task Manager one or more applications will show "not responding" in
the applications tab. If you go to the Processes tab you'll see which
application is hogging your CPU's resources.
There's a little gadget you can add to your sidebar that acts like a
Tacometer and shows how hard your CPU is working. Its called CPU
Meter. Watch it change in real time as it reflect how hard your CPU is
working.
You can get a lot more detail from Task Manager. Under View, select
columns and check off some additional features which you can also
monitor.
Just for fun, I'll briefly discuss one. For the more daring add Page
Faults from View in Task Manager where it says add columns and sit
back and watch. Lets look at Task Manager itself under Task Manager's
Processes tab. Right now for me, It shows up as taskmgr.exe with it
taking between 1-2% of my CPU and 7284K of memory, under the Page
Fault Column I just added to monitor processes it shows in the several
minutes it has been running that it has had 16,440 page faults.
To understand a Page Fault you first need to know a bit how Virtual
Memory and Physical Memory Pages work. Windows divides both RAM (your
physical memmory) and your virtual memory into a series of "pages" or
amounts of memory it can gulp down at once and do something with.
Remember in order for your computer to do anything, some instruction
from the operating system or some code or data from some application
has to be placed into memory, either physical memory or Virtual memory
which is a area set aside on your hard drive which is referred to as
paging memory or a swap file in earlier versions of Windows.
Now a little black magic happens. Windows and the underlying
hardware/software you are using agree how to translate the address of
a virtual memory page into a corresponding physical page. Because you
typically have far less physical memory then memory hungry Windows and
your various applications need, there is a mechanism that defines how
virtual memory pages get switched into and taken out of physical
memory.
In Windows speak every time this needs to happen this is a page fault.
Page Faults, in of themselves are NOT errors. In other words whatever
Windows had to do with the application you're trying to use, the bit
of code needed to do whatever you're asking of it wasn't at that split
second currently in physical memory and Windows had to go out to
Virtual memory, find the Virtual memory page the bit of code it needs
was in, then bring it into physical memory, often at the expense of
switching something already in physical memory out into virtual
memory. This is a never ending dance that happens transparently behind
the scenes and I over simplefied it. The more you ask Windows to do at
once, the more it has to shuffle things back and forth between
physical memory and virtual memory.
By adding the page fault tab in Task Manager you can monitor how often
page faults are happening with each process you have running. The more
page faults you see, the harder your making your your computer run
because every time a page fault happens, whatever Windows was trying
to do with this particular instruction that caused the page fault it
can't do what it needs to untill it frees up some physical memory and
shifts whatever it needs from Virtual memory.
So Windows must transfer control to sub routine, the page fault
handler. One of two things happen. Either the page fault hander
decides this is memory page transfer request is valid and finds some
physical memory to move it to and Windows continues about its
business, the bit of code is now in physical memory, what hardware or
software needed it can now have this particular instruction acted upon
and everybody is happy.
Sometimes the page fault hander decides the request is invalid. Every
once in awhile two processes want to use the same physical memory page
at the same time, which like in Star Trek is like mixing matter and
anti matter and BOOM, which isn't a good thing. So while Windows
doesn't blow up it does throw a page fault error, often stopping or
hanging the application. We've all seen the dreaded 'an exception has
occurred' error message. Sometimes it just don't get thrown and the
application just hangs up. When you see the CPU use rapidly climing
Windows is probably trying to throw more resurces to resolve whatever
issue it is and if it can't it may just run at a crawl or one
application hangs or in the worse case sooner or later Windows itself
hangs. There's about 10,000 other things that can go wrong too!
