System Idle Process

[Laura]

Hi,

In addition to my last post, I tried setting the affinity
for each simulation process and this did not change
anything. Is there any documentation on how Windows 2000
allocates resources so I could see why this is happening?
I do not understand why the System Idle Process would take
one entire processor's resources 99% of the time while my
simulation is sitting there, waiting to get some processor
time. (Eg. Simulation normally takes 5h to run and the
last one took 40h because it couldn't get any processor
time). Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

(Previous Posting)
Hi,

I am using W2K on a dual processor PC to run 2 simulation
programs. I do not use this PC for anything else (no MSN,
email, or anything at all). One simulation gets 50% of the
processor resources (one entire processor). The other
simulation gets between 0 and 3%, even though both
simulations are set to be a high priority. All other
resources are allocated to 'System Idle Process'. Most of
the time, 'System Idle Process' (which I think is O/S
maintenance) is using one entire processor's resources
(2.4Gig speed) while my simulation sits there, getting
nearly 0 resources at all. It does this for hours and
hours, once in a while the second program will get 50%
resources for about 2 seconds, and then it goes back to
0-3%.

I have tried restarting my computer, adjusting priorities,
and I don't know what else to do. Does anyone know if this
is a bug in W2K? My single processor PC runs 2 programs
faster than this one! Can someone please help me? Oh, also
I should mention that these simulations are in FORTRAN so
they do not support multithreading, they run on one
processor each.

 

[Richard McCall [MSFT]]

The system Idle process is just the remainder of % cpu that is not being
used by an active process.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winntas/maintain/monitor/03wntpca.asp