Description
This visualization shows how busy your computer’s CPU has been.
Your computer is incredible – it has a powerful ‘brain’ called a CPU which does the basic processing for your computer.
Unlike men, it can do multiple things at the same time however it does have limits – essentially it can do a certain number of things per second.
The clever thing is that your computer, when it gets a bit overloaded, does not reject these extra things. Rather it forms an orderly queue a bit like a to-do list. It actually has a few of these queues for things of differing importance.
Real-world impacts
If you are suffering from poor performance on your computer it could be because of external things like the network being slow or busy or it could be because of things on your computer being busy – the CPU is one of these things.
A busy CPU could result in slow application startup times or slow load times for spreadsheets and documents or it could result in the slow processing of things – like the display of webpages.
If you use audio or video on your computer (such as Skype, FaceTime or social media-based calling) you could experience stuttering of the video or audio.
Busy CPUs are a “slow down” issue – your computer is working but just taking too long to do things.
What to look for
In this visualization, a higher number means a busier CPU.
There is nothing wrong with a CPU being busy – in fact, we really want the CPU to be doing something otherwise we could have purchased a cheaper lower speed computer!
In fact, CPU utilisation of 100% or more is not unusual. Very high CPU utilisation for short periods is also okay. What can cause a problem is high or very high CPU utilisation all of the time.
We need our CPU to be able to clear those queues, or at least keep up with them so they don’t get too long.
How do we test
Most computers keep a measure of their CPU usage – each type of computer (Windows, MaxOS, Linux etc) do it a little differently.
We read these measures periodically and ‘normalise’ them to make them report the same measure across different machine types.
We then extract the basic CPU utilisation and report that as a percentage.
What could cause High CPU utilisation
At the basic level, too many things on the CPUs to-do list will cause high CPU utilisation.
That might be because you have a very old and slow computer and it is time to upgrade but don’t rush to that conclusion. A computer that is a few years old and is only being asked to do a bit of email, web browsing and the occasional document or spreadsheet should be given the benefit of the doubt and not be immediately traded in for younger model!
It may be because you are asking your computer to do an unreasonably large number of things at the same time. Again, don’t assume that is the case because today’s computers are pretty capable machines.
It may be because just one of your applications is hogging the CPU, this could be because of a bug, it is poorly written or you are just using it in a way that it was not designed to be used.
And finally, of course, it may be that is it time to trade your old clunker for a more modern machine.
Spend some time figuring out which of these is the problem and you can save yourself a whole bunch of money.
Next steps to diagnose or repair for Residential Trial Customers
Firstly have a think about whether you feel your computer is running slow – just because the visualization shows your CPU is busy does not mean your computer is slow.
If you feel the computer is ‘slow’ and the visualization shows your CPU is NOT busy then look elsewhere – memory or filesystem performance are worth a look. If it is slow when doing things that use the network, look at the network based visualizations (Throughput, Loss, Latency, DNS etc) for performance issues.
If the slowness is not related to network activities take a look at the other computer platform related visualizations such as Memory and Filesystem performance.
If your computer is slow and the CPU visualization looks like it is consistently busy then you will need to troubleshoot what is using the CPU.
This can be a dark art but we can always make a start by opening up the available system performance application on your machine and see if a process is hogging the CPU or if there are just too many things running or if your machine is just old and slow.
On Windows you can start with the Task Manager, on MacOSX you can start with the Activity monitor and while linux machines have their GUI apps, the shell based ‘top’ is a great resource.
Try shutting down CPU hogging applications while watching the CPU utilisation on your machine and see if that helps narrow down the culprit.
Browsers are notorious for hogging CPU when they have lots of website tabs open – try shutting down all of the tabs and then shutting down the browser while watching the CPU utilisation on your machine.
Assuming you don’t have to buy a new machine and you find a culprit then use google or contact the application owner to see if they have a fix or a recommendation to stop it hogging things again.
More visualization Overviews:
- TelcoSI: Excited space nerds
- Basic Network Measures Overview
- Basic Computer Measures Overview
- TelcoSI proxyNM: Home/Residential Setup, Information and Visualization Explainers.
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