What are the reasons for systems to be idle?

[Dharamsi]

hi.........
i have heard people saying that their operating system or Cpu sometimes turn in an idle state. Can anyone help me in understanding the reason behind the system getting idle?

[Devasis]

In Windows operating systems, the System Idle Process contains one or more kernel threads which run when no other running thread can be scheduled on a CPU. Consider an example, that there may be no running thread in the system, or all running threads are already running on a different CPU. In a multiprocessor system, there is one idle thread associated with each CPU.

The threads in the System Idle Process are used by Windows NT to implement CPU power saving. The exact power saving scheme depends on the hardware and firmware capabilities of the system in question. For instance, on x86 processors, the idle thread will run a loop of HLT instructions, which causes the CPU to turn off many internal components and wait until an IRQ arrives.

The CPU time consumed by the System Idle Process is commonly of interest for end users, as it is a measure of the CPU utilization in their system which is easily accessible through Windows' Task Manager program. There are, however, more detailed sources of such information available through Windows' performance monitoring system accessible with the perfmon program, which includes more finely grained categorization of CPU time spending. A limited subset of the CPU time categorization is also accessible through the Task Manager, which can display CPU usage by CPU, and categorized by time spent in user vs. kernel code.

[Solomon]

i think the basic reason might be:

In the CPu there may be possibility that some device such as your video card is generating endless request-for-service interrupts. Any card could do this if it failed in a certain way, and that would burden the CPU, but it wouldn't have any specific association with an application, just a driver.

[MrChris-]

try with this one:

try to check under services and make sure the Messaging service is disabled.
This is a Microsoft problem which generally is detected in most cases that was fixed wth Service Pack 2. The messaging service should be disbaled by default.

thus check after disabling messages what is the current progress of your system

[Calvin K]

The idle process is running because system has nothing else it can do until
> some other process such as a disk retrieval or receipt of some data over the
> network completes. If you do not defrag your disk regularly maybe you
> should do so to reduce the clock time required to retrieve a file from
> disk.

[dhanubaba]

system idle process is use when system received high priority process to done..it use system idle process.
for example when press ALT+CTRL+DEL it receive task manager, so it used system idle process i think.

[dhanubaba]

try to check under services and make sure the Messaging service is disabled.
This is a Microsoft problem which generally is detected in most cases that was fixed wth Service Pack 2. The messaging service should be disbaled by default.

thus check after disabling messages what is the current progress of your system

these messaging service is for msn massenger..? type maconfig on the run and we can stop those services..