10 ms·

An old manager of mine once spent the day trying to kill a process that was running at 99% on Windows box. When I finally got round to see what he was doing I

• TacticalCoder 2y ago
  [dead]
• belter 2y ago
  Did he have a pointy hair?
• cassepipe 2y ago
  I abandonned Windows 8 for linux because of an bug (?) where my HDD was showing it was 99% busy all the time. I had removed every startup program that could be and analysed thouroughly for any viruses, to no avail. Had no debugging skills at the time and wasn't sure the hardware could stand windows 10. That's how linux got me.
  • saintfire 2y ago
    I had this happen with an nvme drive. Tried changing just about every setting that affected the slot. Everything worked fine on my Linux install ootb
  • dr-detroit 2y ago
    [dead]
  • margana 2y ago
    Why is this such a huge issue if it merely shows it's busy, but the performance of it indicates that it actually isn't? Switching to Linux can be a good choice for a lot of people, the reason just seems a bit odd here. Maybe it was simply the straw that broke the camel's back.
    • RHSeeger 2y ago
      1. I expect that a HD that is actually doing things 100% of the time is going to have it's lifespan significantly reduce, and 2. If it isn't doing anything and it just lying to you... when there IS a problem, your tools to diagnose the problem are limited because you can't trust what they're telling you
    • ddingus 2y ago
      Over the years I have used top and friends to profile machines and identify expensive bottlenecks. Once one comes to count on those tools, the idea of one being wrong, and actually really wrong! --is just a bad rub. Fixing it would be gratifying and reassuring too.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    Recent Linux distributions are quickly catching up to Windows and macOS. Do a fresh install of your favorite distribution and then use 'ps' to look at what's running. Dozens of processes doing who knows what? They're probably not pegging your CPU at 100%, which is good, but it seems that gone are the days when you could turn on your computer and it was truly idle until you commanded it to actually do something. That's a special use case now, I suppose.
    • ndriscoll 2y ago
      IME on Linux the only things that use random CPU while idle are web browsers. Otherwise, there's dbus and NetworkManager and bluez and oomd and stuff, but most processes have a fraction of a second used CPU over months. If they're not using CPU, they'll presumably swap out if needed, so they're using ~nothing.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • radlad 2y ago
      this is why I use arch btw
      • rirze 2y ago
        this guy arches
      • diggan 2y ago
        Add Gnome3 and you can have that too! Source: me, a arch+gnome user, who recently had to turn off the search indexer as it was stuck processing countless multi-GB binary files...
      • johnisgood 2y ago
        Exactly, or Void, or Alpine, but I love pacman.
    • craftkiller 2y ago
  • BizarroLand 2y ago
    Windows 8/8.1/10 had an issue for a while where when it was run on spinning rust HDD it would peg it out and slow the system to a crawl. The only solution was to swap over to a SSD.
• m463 2y ago
  That's what managers do. Silly idle process. If you've got time for leanin', you've got time for cleanin'
• marcosdumay 2y ago
  Windows used to have that habit of making the processes CPU starved, and yet claiming the CPU was idle all the time. Since the Microsoft response to the bug was denying and gaslighting the affected people, we can't tell for sure what caused it. But several people were in a situation where their computer couldn't finish any work, and the task-manager claimed all of the CPU time was spent on that line item.
  • gruez 2y ago
    I've never heard of this. How do you know it's windows "gaslighting" users, and not something dumb like thermal throttling or page faults?
    • belter 2y ago
      Well this is one possible scenario. Power management.... "Windows 10 Task Manager shows 100% CPU but Performance Monitor Shows less than 2%" - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-10-task-manager-shows-100-cpu-but/00c92238-9382-4946-bc6a-bbc451888b96 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
    • marcosdumay 2y ago
      It's gaslighting because it consists on people from Microsoft explicitly saying that it is impossible, it's not how Windows behave, and the user's system is idle instead of overloaded. Gaslighting customers was the standard Microsoft's reaction to bugs until at least 2007, when I last oversaw somebody interacting with them.
  • RajT88 2y ago
    > Since the Microsoft response to the bug was denying and gaslighting the affected people Well. I wouldn't go that far. Any busy dev team is incentivized to make you run the gauntlet: 1. It's not an issue (you have to prove to me it's an issue) 2. It's not my issue (you have to prove to me it's my issue) 3. It's not that important (you have to prove it has significant business value to fix it) 4. It's not that time sensitive (you have to prove it's worth fixing soon) It was exactly like this at my last few companies. Microsoft is quite a lot like this as well. If you have an assigned CSAM, they can help run the gauntlet. That's what they are there for. See also: The 6 stages of developer realization: https://www.amazon.com/Panvola-Debugging-Computer-Programmer-Programming/dp/B0BQ76LN3T https://www.amazon.com/Panvola-Debugging-Computer-Programmer...
• Twirrim 2y ago
  Years ago I worked for a company that provided managed hosting services. That included some level of alarm watching for customers. We used to rotate the "person of contact" (POC) each shift, and they were responsible for reaching out to customers, and doing initial ticket triage. One customer kept having a CPU usage alarm go off on their Windows instances not long after midnight. The overnight POC reached out to the customer to let them know that they had investigated and noticed that "system idle processes" were taking up 99% of CPU time and the customer should probably investigate, and then closed the ticket. I saw the ticket within a minute or two of it reopening as the customer responded with a barely diplomatic message to the tune of "WTF". I picked up that ticket, and within 2 minutes had figured out the high CPU alarm was being caused by the backup service we provided, apologised to the customer and had that ticket closed... but not before someone not in the team saw the ticket and started sharing it around. I would love to say that particular support staff never lived that incident down, but sadly that particular incident was par for the course with them, and the team spent inordinate amount of time doing damage control with customers.
  • panarky 2y ago
    In the 90s I worked for a retail chain where the CIO proposed to spend millions to upgrade the point-of-sale hardware. The old hardware was only a year old, but the CPU was pegged at 100% on every device and scanning barcodes was very sluggish. He justified the capex by saying if cashiers could scan products faster, customers would spend less time in line and sales would go up. A little digging showed that the CIO wrote the point-of-sale software himself in an ancient version of Visual Basic. I didn't know VB, but it didn't take long to find the loops that do nothing except count to large numbers to soak up CPU cycles since VB didn't have a sleep() function.
    • jimt1234 2y ago
      That's hilarious. I had a similar situation, also back in the 90s, when a developer shipped some code that kept pegging the CPU on a production server. He insisted it was the server, and the company should spend $$$ on a new one to fix the problem. We went back-and-forth for a while: his code was crap versus the server hardware was inadequate, and I was losing the battle, because I was just a lowly sysadmin, while he was a great software engineer. Also, it was Java code, and back then, Java was kinda new, and everyone thought it could do no wrong. I wasn't a developer at all back then, but I decided to take a quick look at his code. It was basically this: 1. take input from a web form 2. do an expensive database lookup 3. do an expensive network request, wait for response 4. do another expensive network request, wait for response 5. and, of course, another expensive network request, wait for response 6. fuck it, another expensive network request, wait for response 7. a couple more database lookups for customer data 8. store the data in a table 9. store the same data in another table. and, of course, another one. 10. now, check to see if the form was submitted with valid data. if not, repeat all steps above to back-out the data from where it was written. 11. finally, check to see if the customer is a valid/paying customer. if not, once again, repeat all the steps above to back-out the data. I looked at the logs, and something like 90% of the requests were invalid data from the web form or invalid/non-paying customers (this service was provided only to paying customers). I was so upset from this dude convincing management that my server was the problem that I sent an email to pretty much everyone that said, basically, "This code sucks. Here's the problem: check for invalid data/customers first.", and I included a snippet from the code. The dude replied-to-all immediately, claiming I didn't know anything about Java code, and I should stay in my lane. Well, throughout the day, other emails started to trickle in, saying, "Yeah, the code is the problem here. Please fit it ASAP." The dude was so upset that he just left, he went completely AWOL, he didn't show up to work for a week or so. We were all worried, like he jumped off a bridge or something. It turned into an HR incident. When he finally returned, he complained to HR that I stabbed him in the back, that he couldn't work with me because I was so rude. I didn't really care; I was a kid. Oh yeah, his nickname became AWOL Wang. LOL
• nullhole 2y ago
  To be fair, it is a really poorly named "process". The computer equivalent of the "everything's ok" alarm.
  • chowells 2y ago
    Long enough ago (win95 era) it wasn't part of Windows to sleep the CPU when there was no work to be done. It always assigned some task to the CPU. The system idle process was a way to do this that played nicely with all of the other process management systems. I don't remember when they finally added CPU power management. SP3? Win98? Win98SE? Eh, it was somewhere in there.
    • drsopp 2y ago
      I remember listening on FM radio to my 100MHz computer running FreeBSD, which sounded like calm rain, and to Windows 95, which sounded like a screaming monster.
    • eggsome 2y ago
      There were a number of hacks to deal with this. RAIN was very popular back in the day, but AMNHLTM appears to have better compatibility with modern CPUs.
• fifilura 2y ago
  To be fair, there are worse mistakes. It does say 99% CPU.
• Agentus 2y ago
  reminds of when i was a kid and noticed a virus had taken over a registry. from that point forward i attempted to delete every single registry file, not quite understanding. Between that and excessive bad website viewing, I dunno how i ever managed to not brick my operating system, unlike my grandma who seemed to brick her desktop in a timely fashion before each of the many monthly visits to her place.
  • bornfreddy 2y ago
    The things grandmas do to see their grandsons regularly. Smart. :-)
• mrmuagi 2y ago
  I wonder if you make a process with idle in it you could end up in the reverse track where users ignore it. Is there anything preventing an executable being named System Idle.
• _ea1k 2y ago
  I worked at a government site with a government machine at one time. I had an issue, so I took it to the IT desk. They were able to get that sorted, but then said I had another issue. "Your CPU is running at 100% all the time, because some sort of unkillable process is consuming all your cpu". Yep, that was "System Idle" that was doing it. They had the best people.
• kernal 2y ago
  You're keeping us in suspense. Did he ever manage to kill the System Idle process?