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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Excessive Proccesor Usage??

Macpadawon - Apr 20, 2006 - 2:56 am

For some odd reaseon, I find that my "System Services" daemon or proccess takes up 17 + percent of my CPU time. It is enough to create mini pauses when I game.. As soon as I force quit the proccess, My computer becomes much more responsive. Any ideas out there? Mainly, if there is a pref file that this thing is linked to I would LIke to know. Also can anyone tell me what "System Services" is/does? I think it has something to do with AppleScript or AppleEvents? Any help appreciated!

ericl - Apr 21, 2006 - 10:13 am

Whatever tool you are using to gather CPU time takes a snapshot of kernel statistics; the snapshot being a single instance in time. So at that given instance, this daemon used 17% of the CPU. At another instance in time it may use 0% or it may use 33%.

How are you gathering your info; Activity Monitor?

There is a wealth of documentation on System Services at http://developer.apple.com

It looks like this stuff facilitates applications communicating with each other.

As far a pauses when you game, I start out by making sure that no other apps are running, no other users are logged-in, etc.

Try that. If you still want to improve performance, tell me what kind of computer you have & how much memory you have.

Thanks, Eric

Macpadawon - Apr 22, 2006 - 4:19 am

Eric, yes Activity monitor. I have a Powermac G4 Quicksilver 933Mhz, with 1.25gigs of memory. Running 10.4.6 I know for sure that there is trouble with this proccess. When I quit the proccess through the activity monitor, then everything speeds up and i have smooth gaming etc. Any ideas. I am thinking there is a bad pref, or something that is causing a mem leak or something. I have noticed that this process pages out a few times, and there are faults listed under the faults catigory in Activity viewer. Definite wrong.

Any Ideas. JM

Macpadawon - Apr 22, 2006 - 4:25 am

ERIC, So sorry,

It's ACTUALLY "SYSTEM EVENTS" that is giving me trouble..using up to 30% of my cpu..just about fulltime!! Ugh! help!

ericl - Apr 22, 2006 - 10:26 am

Do this:

(1) search on Google for system events - there are links to apple pages on this subject

(2) Determine whether or not you NEED this stuff turned-on, or whether or not it got turned-on by accident - it sounds like you do not need this, but maybe one of your apps needs it without your knowledge.

(3) The best way to measure how much CPU resource is using is via terminal (UNIX shell window) run the command #ps -aux, then look at the TIME field for all your processes. This is how many CPU clock cycles each process has used since boot time. This is a "relative" measurement; how much CPU time has system events been using compared to the other processes like your window manager.

(4) Paging/faults are probably normal. I say probably because I am not very familiar with the Darwin paging architecture, but on Sun this would be normal

(5) There are memory leak detectors that are part of compilers, etc. I have seen memory leaks, but never from code from an O/S vendor (I don't use MS much). The symptom of a memory leak is that the system has lots of free memory right after a boot, but over time free memory drops to where the kernel gets excited (not quite a panic). The first line of output from the vm_stat command lists free memory.

(6) Reality may be that you may be better off running an intensive application (your game) on a faster computer. By faster I mean a G5 tower which in addition to faster CPU's has a faster bus & faster memory architecture (machines that need memory installed in pairs (2 way memory interleave) can access memory faster; some UNIX boxes have a 16 way memory interleave.

Thanks, Eric

Macpadawon - Apr 22, 2006 - 3:18 pm

Thanks for your reply Eric. MY G4 is aged, but it's a special G4. It's Like a G4 on Crack cocaine! HAhahah, anyhow... I have solved the issue. It was tricky, but the culprit was a folder action script that was monitoring the contents of the folder. As soon as I dissabled it, I am running clean again! Wahoo...I simply used and discovered activity viewer inspection tool, which was of great help. Thanks again for your help and details! No doubt they sent me on the correct path!

JM