Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Sunday 09 March 2008 17:10, Basil Chupin wrote:
... (BTW, zypper is a damn big CPU hog - can take up to 98% of the CPU! Sheesh!)
So... When you get in line at the bank, the cinema, the market check-out, you periodically let someone behind you go ahead of you?
Programs use CPU until they've completed the computations they must do.
Or the pre-emptive scheduler steps in, and checks to see if a new process deserves to get on the CPU... In this case, zypper is doing what it needs to do *AND* apparently, no other processes need the CPU when Basil is running zypper.
It's up to the OS to aportion CPU resources to competing processes.
The only thing that reduces a given program's CPU consumption below 100% is the invocation of I/O operations that cannot be immediately satisfied. That, and sleeping...
Yep. Strange as it may seem, 100% CPU usage is actually the ideal. [This is one reason why I prefer setting up systems with several small SCSI disks rather than one large uber-disk... multiple disk-head seeks can be carried out in parallel, reducing the amount of idle-waiting-on-i/o time.] Many Fortune 500 companies would dearly love it if their compute servers ran at 100% CPU, all day every day. Idle CPU cycles are wasted moments, and with expensive hardware, costly ones at that as the equipment is depreciating in value, regardless of whether it is getting anything done or not!
Randall Schulz
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