Wrong CPUUsage with DualCore CPU ?

Nevertheless · Post by **Nevertheless** » March 7th, 2006, 12:27 am

Hi all,

I'm having a strange problem: In my Athlon 64 X2 system (running WinXP SP2) LCD Smartie's $CPUUsage variable appearently shows only the utilization of CPU 0

What I like to see, is the total CPU utilization. How can I managed this?

Thanks for any help!

ReverseEngineered · Post by **ReverseEngineered** » March 7th, 2006, 12:39 am

At the moment there is no simple solution to this. The current code only checks the CPU 0 usage. However, we are currently rewriting that entire part of LCD Smartie. I will be sure to make note to provide functions so that a person can check the CPU utilization of seperate processors, or all of them together at once.

Thanks for mentioning this bug. We appreciate user feedback.

smack · Post by **smack** » March 7th, 2006, 11:10 am

Nevertheless wrote:What I like to see, is the total CPU utilization. How can I managed this?

You can get this (and lots of other) info from the Windows performance counters. Use PerfPlugin for this (Advanced use, Function 4).

Use the Windows utility perfmon to find out the correct name of the specific performance counter. The counter names are localised in Windows' local language.

For example, on my German Windows system the counter for "percentage of total processor time" has the name "\Prozessor(_Total)\Prozessorzeit (%)".

smack · Post by **smack** » March 7th, 2006, 11:16 am

ReverseEngineered wrote:At the moment there is no simple solution to this. The current code only checks the CPU 0 usage. However, we are currently rewriting that entire part of LCD Smartie. I will be sure to make note to provide functions so that a person can check the CPU utilization of seperate processors, or all of them together at once.

IMO, there is no good reason to implement this in the main program of LCD Smartie. Why would you want to write your own function to measure CPU utilization, when you can get this info from the Windows system (performance counters)?

Post by **limbo** » March 7th, 2006, 4:58 pm

smack says that right
You can use the perfmon plugin

ReverseEngineered · Post by **ReverseEngineered** » March 7th, 2006, 6:30 pm

Perhaps my intentions weren't quite clear. There are already functions for displaying the CPU utilization, which work by reading these performance counters. However, only a single performance counter is read. Since we're moving everything over to plugins, PerfPlugin will basically take the place of this function. All I meant was that, rather than always displaying the CPU 0 performance counter, I would make it an option to display any of them (by adding an optional parameter).

I'm up to my neck in threads and message queues at the moment, so this might not be any clearer. I'll worry about that more when we get to that point (we're not even close to that right now).

Nevertheless · Post by **Nevertheless** » March 27th, 2006, 7:27 am

@limbo and @smack: I totally disagree with you to use a performance counter for this: PCs running LCDsmartie are often used as HTPCs in the living room. For this reason, I alsways recommend to disable the performance counters - e.g. to avoid the hourly disc check the OS otherwise performs regulary.

I will be sure to make note to provide functions so that a person can check the CPU utilization of seperate processors, or all of them together at once.

@ReverseEngineered: Please keep on goind to implement this for the new version of LCDsmartie. More and more dual-core CPUs are coming in the market - and by using the $CPUUsage variable, I would prefer to get the combined utilization of all CPUs at one (like other apps are doing it), which seems to be the natural way of interpreting CPU utilization.

As new user, I would not expect to get only the utilization of one CPU instead of all of them combined...

With a plugin, you can make for detailed functions available, but this sounds to me like a very basic function which should belong to the program itself

smack · Post by **smack** » March 27th, 2006, 9:22 am

Nevertheless wrote:@limbo and @smack: I totally disagree with you to use a performance counter for this: PCs running LCDsmartie are often used as HTPCs in the living room. For this reason, I alsways recommend to disable the performance counters - e.g. to avoid the hourly disc check the OS otherwise performs regulary.

I'm not an expert when it comes to Windows internals so I don't know how the performance counters and an "hourly disc check" are related. You seem to be sure about that so I won't argue...

Btw. did you notice ReverseEngineered's reply that even the variable $CPUUsage gets its value from the Windows performance counter?

Nevertheless · Post by **Nevertheless** » March 28th, 2006, 7:10 am

You are right (my mistake) - I meant the disc performance counters that need to be switched off to avoid the hourly dick check.

Besides this: I still vote to get the combined CPU utilization when using the $CPUUsage variable, instead of only CPU0 like it is rights now. Hopefully this will be implemented in the next version of LCD Smartie

Jumpin' Jon · Post by **Jumpin' Jon** » April 5th, 2006, 7:34 pm

I use

Code: Select all

$Right($dll(perf,4,5,\Processor(0)\% Processor Time)%,$4%)$Right($dll(perf,4,5,\Processor(1)\% Processor Time)%,$4%)

for my Athlon64 X2 4200+.

I'm guessing the built-in one uses the "_Total" value, which - while correct - does generally show a lower-than-expected value. e.g. I load Photoshop and see my CPU hit 50% max.

JJ

Wrong CPUUsage with DualCore CPU ?

Wrong CPUUsage with DualCore CPU ?

Re: Wrong CPUUsage with DualCore CPU ?