December 2nd, 2005

Psychic debugging: Why your CPU usage is hovering at 50%

Sometimes psychic debugging consists merely of seeing the bigger picture.

On one of our internal bug-reporting mailing lists, someone asked, “How come when I do XYZ, my CPU usage goes to 50%?”

My psychic answer: “Because you have two processors.”

The response was genuine surprise and amazement. How did I know they had two processors? Simple: If they had only one processor, the CPU usage would be 100%. This seems unhelpful on its face, but it actually does help diagnose the problem, because now they can search the bug database for bugs in the XYZ feature tagged “100% CPU” to see if any of those apply to their situation. (And in this case, it turns out that one did.)

Topics
Other

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

0 comments

Discussion are closed.