High CPU Usage on a MacBook Pro?

[rekhyt]

I believe there might be something wrong with my MacBook Pro-It's a late 2008 one, mid configuration. Intel C2D 2.4 Ghz, 2 graphics card, 2GB RAM, ... (Using SL)

I usually find myself using up most of the RAM, with 96MB of RAM left right now, and sometimes when using Photoshop, up to 15MB. My CPU usage is quite high, with Chrome using 17% + other Chrome processes.

I'm only opening up 13 active tabs with 12 pinned and disabled tabs; Is the CPU usage too high?

 

[bamf]

Are you doing anything with Flash? Flash is a CPU hog in OS X.

 

[x0r-lord]

I believe there might be something wrong with my MacBook Pro-It's a late 2008 one, mid configuration. Intel C2D 2.4 Ghz, 2 graphics card, 2GB RAM, ... (Using SL)

I usually find myself using up most of the RAM, with 96MB of RAM left right now, and sometimes when using Photoshop, up to 15MB. My CPU usage is quite high, with Chrome using 17% + other Chrome processes.

I'm only opening up 13 active tabs with 12 pinned and disabled tabs; Is the CPU usage too high?

I was curious about this so I tested my computer at idle, and with multiple google chrome tabs open. I honestly thought It'd cripple most systems to open that many tabs..

using "top -l 2|head -10"
heres the readout when its Idle (Safari, Geektools, and Terminal open):

Processes: 51 total, 3 running, 1 stuck, 47 sleeping, 245 threads 
2010/09/07 11:58:23
Load Avg: 0.09, 0.18, 0.16 
CPU usage: 0.0% user, 25.0% sys, 75.0% idle 
SharedLibs: 5800K resident, 6144K data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 6983 total, 281M resident, 13M private, 207M shared.
PhysMem: 706M wired, 539M active, 284M inactive, 1529M used, 2439M free.
VM: 123G vsize, 1036M framework vsize, 52919(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 19325/18M in, 18579/2842K out.
Disks: 35201/918M read, 34900/712M written.

And with the same processes + 13 Open Tabs in Google Chrome: (Link)

Processes: 69 total, 4 running, 65 sleeping, 379 threads 
2010/09/07 12:11:49
Load Avg: 1.39, 0.92, 0.53 
CPU usage: 26.66% user, 20.0% sys, 53.33% idle 
SharedLibs: 5800K resident, 6144K data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 13423 total, 649M resident, 30M private, 303M shared.
PhysMem: 747M wired, 1021M active, 335M inactive, 2103M used, 1864M free.
VM: 143G vsize, 1036M framework vsize, 92081(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 28479/26M in, 27108/4816K out.
Disks: 39087/1018M read, 38789/809M written.

when I check my processes using "ps -U myusername", theres 15 google processes running,14 of which are:
"2557 ?? 0:06.11 /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/Versions/6.0.472.53/Google Chrome Helper.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome Helper"...
they're using up 575MB of Real Memory.

My computer isn't really noticeably slower, but it IS using more then 2GB of RAM. you should consider upgrading to 4GB/8GB of RAM (although i believe your model is limited to 6GB). or use bookmarks (instead of having 13 open tabs), as this is probably caused by RAM, and not your CPU

 

[mulo]

google launches a new process for each tap + the window itself = it's a CPU hog, like flash. use safari.

 

[rekhyt]

Would love to, but pin tabs is really a feature that I love to use. Chrome's implementation of inactive pinned tabs is even better.

 

[rekhyt]

There's also another strange thing going on-RAM keeps to be disappearing for some reason.

In this recent instance shown by iStatMenus, there had only been an astonishing 9MB of RAM remaining free on my MacBook Pro. :| Is there a hardware defect or something?

Update: I closed iTunes and the amount of RAM free was became 23MB. :| What's happening?

 

[Tanto]

I had a very similar problem that I noticed today when my MBP was running very sluggishly. As it turned out, Activity Monitor showed 1.82GB RAM being used by the "Google Chrome Worker" process, which greatly alarmed me. I had to force quit Google Chrome and after I restarted the program I cleared my cache. Now everything is fine, but I'm keeping tabs on Chrome's memory usage now.

It might have something to do with the fact that Chrome 5.0 was running but after the restart it was 6.0. Maybe the automatic update screwed up the active process somehow.

@rekhyt: You should be able to set the amount of RAM that you allow Photoshop to use under its Preferences/Performance tab. 2GB is still pretty low to be running Photoshop efficiently.

 

[cluthz]

There's also another strange thing going on-RAM keeps to be disappearing for some reason.

In this recent instance shown by iStatMenus, there had only been an astonishing 9MB of RAM remaining free on my MacBook Pro. :| Is there a hardware defect or something?

Nope, with 2GB RAM and SL that would be normal. The system uses as much as it can to be more efficent. I'm using 3.1GB now and I only have safari (10 tabs), Word, Mail, Itunes and Adium up

Update: I closed iTunes and the amount of RAM free was became 23MB. :| What's happening?

Notice that iTunes will start instantly if you click it? It's still in RAM, until it is needed to be removed.

 

[mulo]

The system uses as much as it can to be more efficent. I'm using 3.1GB now and I only have safari (10 tabs), Word, Mail, Itunes and Adium up.

correct, the problem is that it doesn't do that, it writes to swap instead. especially VLC 64 is horrible, it has a memory leak, so you actually have to either restart or unmount the drive that your playing your file from, to clear the memory, until then it is marked as active.

 

[CW Jones]

Holy cow, swapping over 1GB of your HDD???? Time to get more RAM I would say. Photoshop could easily use all your free RAM by itself. I would honestly look at prices of 4 or 6GB.