Processor Percentage normal?

[applefan69]

Hello everyone, soo Im using my new macbook with core 2 duo intel processor, (2.0Ghz) with leopard.

I recently installed menumeters for my menu bar that makes a graph and also displays the percentage that my processors are being used. So its just like acitivy monitor just for my menubar.

Anyways, I noticed that... when im not doing anything on my mac, my percent on both cores is about 1% USER, 1% SYSTEM.

But when i do just plain ANY task, it goes up like 15-20% for a second, and returns back to like 1%

I know this aint a big deal and may seem silly that I'm asking about this simply because OF COURSE it would go up when im doing stuff.

But what i mean is I'll do extremely simple things like just scroll down a window in Safari and my processor will move up to the 20% range. ORRR, I can do something that i would consider rather heavy processing, such as open Limewire, and my percent will still only go in the 20% range.

Im just wondering why it's almost always going up to about the same percent even though the amount of load the current thing Im doing SHOULD be much different.

 

[LtRammstein]

That's the great thing about the Intel Core 2 Duo processors!

If you did that on a PowerPC processor, you would see it spike rather large.

The Intel processors are really efficient in their pipeline design. A pipeline is basically a set of points in an assembly line and executes multiple instructions at a time.

So really easy tasks like scrolling in Safari, it won't spike much, but if you are rendering a video, it'll spike to 100%!

Opening Limewire is actually really remedial. All it is is running the main "executable" and linking all the header files it needs.

So no worries, your processor is running fine.

Here's a thing you should try... Open 5-7 apps at the same time and watch the percentage. It should peak at about 100% (depending on RAM).

 

[AreanFSL]

Yes - totally normal! All macs/processors I have played around with have the same characteristics.