To Increase CPU Utilization Time

[Shail]

I have an Application Written in C++ which does certain translations.
The problem is that this application consumes very little of CPU Time.
When running overnight, say for about 12 hours, it will consume only
15 Min out of those 12 hours and rest of the time can be seen as
"System Ideal time" in the Task Manager's "Processes" Screen.

Earlier we had more IO related operations during these translations.
That time our CPU Utilization was quite ok and satisfactory but as we
have now removed these IO related operations, although our Application
has become more efficient in performing the same translations, but has
started lagging in consuming the CPU Usage. So the end result is less
translation in a day.

How can I make my application consume more of the CPU Time than the
System Idle Time. OS we are using is Windows 2000 Professional.

I shall be grateful if you can help
Regards
Shailaindra Sharma

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

I have an Application Written in C++ which does certain
translations. The problem is that this application consumes
very little of CPU Time. When running overnight, say for
about 12 hours, it will consume only 15 Min out of those
12 hours and rest of the time can be seen as "System Ideal
time" in the Task Manager's "Processes" Screen.

This is a bad thing?

It is likely that the System Idle Time includes time
the CPU is idle because the system is doing network/disk IO.

Your app might benefit from fewer syscalls and increased
internal buffering. Like reading 512 bytes at a time.

-- Robert

 

[George Macdonald]

I have an Application Written in C++ which does certain translations.
The problem is that this application consumes very little of CPU Time.
When running overnight, say for about 12 hours, it will consume only
15 Min out of those 12 hours and rest of the time can be seen as
"System Ideal time" in the Task Manager's "Processes" Screen.

Earlier we had more IO related operations during these translations.
That time our CPU Utilization was quite ok and satisfactory but as we
have now removed these IO related operations, although our Application
has become more efficient in performing the same translations, but has
started lagging in consuming the CPU Usage. So the end result is less
translation in a day.

How can I make my application consume more of the CPU Time than the
System Idle Time. OS we are using is Windows 2000 Professional.

Have you tried something as simple as bumping the priority, from Task
Manager/Processes to see if that makes any difference? You might get a
better idea what's going on by using something like Taskinfo,
http://www.iarsn.com/download.html instead of Task Manager.

You say you "removed" IO operations but is the system storing "result" data
to a file along the way? I can't think of anything, in your app, other
than IO operations which would give *that* high a system idle time - heap
thrashing through excessive mallocs/freemems and soft page faults wouldn't
seem likely as culprits. Are you sure there's no malware which could be
stealing resources?