• Jake Vinson (unregistered)

    You can't just end the story like that! Did uninstalling it solve his problem?

  • Phil Scott (unregistered)

    I don't think you can install the system idle process. I went and found this program called Prime95 that makes sure you can keep the system idle process from taking over your computer.


    Of course, this post has gotten me into wanting to res hack my machine so instead of "System Idle Process" it says "we ain't doing shit."

  • Phil Scott (unregistered)

    That should read "you can't uninstall the system idle process."

    Note to self: Sarcasm is hard enough to convey over the web WITHOUT the spelling and grammar errors.

  • Jason Mauss (unregistered)

    Jake - I called him back later to find out that he had researched the problem (System Idle Process) - and he apologized (and probably felt pretty stupid). The problem turned out to be that IIS wasn't even RUNNING. Instead of "the pages are loading slow" he should've told me they weren't loading at all.

  • Scott C Reynolds (unregistered)

    Well Jason...Not loading at all is just REALLY REALLY SLOW. Maybe he was content to just sit there and wait. He figures "hey, System Idle Process has to finish what it's doing sometime doesn't it?"

  • Jake Vinson (unregistered)

    Yes, I was being sarcastic as well. Give me some credit.

  • Andrew Connell (unregistered)

    Hillarious... well, did the guy ever call back?

  • icelava (unregistered)

    Didn't he call you back to ask how to uninstall System Idle Process? Did you tell him to run "format c:" and it will solve all his worries to the point where he can go home and relax (literally)?

  • icelava (unregistered)

    Oh wait.... it's not your anecdote, sorry :)

  • Skywing (unregistered)

    Actually, the System Idle Process can take real CPU time.

    Kernel mode DPCs run in the idle process.
    The standard IDE/ATAPI driver does PIO operations with DPCs.

    Normally you wouldn't think this is an issue except for this little gem: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472

    I've had this happen twice to me. The first time was due to this bug: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;835152 (Apparently the NFS driver CPU spins at high IRQL, so it suppresses ATAPI's normal processing).

    The second time has got to be the stupidest thing ever; I put a scratched CDROM into my CD drive, which freaked out. This induced atapi.sys to set the IDE channel that my CDROM drive was on to PIO mode 0. Wonderful.

  • T1TAN (unregistered)

    HAH! i CAN'T BELIEVE. and i was thinking that people around me have no clue about nothing! DAMN. :)

  • Delphi 7 (unregistered)

    ACH - You ruined the puchline with the article title

  • Me (unregistered)

    LOL!

  • Be nice (unregistered)

    That was mean, what a compassionate human being would have done was to explain the meaning of the System Idle Process. And you even said that he wasn't that proficient in English, so you should've taken it easy on him.

  • Filipe (unregistered)

    "Be nice" - a lack of proficiency in English doesn't make you a child, nor does it forgive a 'Systems Administrator' of not knowing what a system idle process is.

  • (cs) in reply to Filipe

    In the "The Practice of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike there is the following  "might be apocryphal" story:  "An early machine was analyzed with a hardware performance monitor and found to be spending 50 percent of its time executing the same sequence of several instructions.  The engineers built a special instruction to encapsulate the function of the sequence... and found it made no difference at all."

    The punchline is left as an exercise for the reader.

  • (cs) in reply to Trevor Raynsford

    You try writing 3,2 Billion USEFUL instructions per second. Overcapacity is only natural.

  • Tyler (unregistered) in reply to Ametheus

    //counter that makes 3.2 billion "useful" instructions per second... forever
    int i = 0;
    while (true) {
        if (i >=INT_MAX) i=0;
        i++;
    }

  • Unklegwar (unregistered)

    Who was the SysAdmin? Tarzan? Tonto?

  • GrouchyAdmin (unregistered)

    I good admin. I fix. I make internet to go fast. Your client bad. EXE bad. UNIX bad. Windows bad. Norton fix.

  • tharpa (unregistered)

    I think Jason's the WTF. He thinks that because the SysAdmin tells him the first sentence, “Hey we having problem on test server that’s hosting the web application,” and then waits for Jason to say something to show that he's there and paying attention, that that meant that the SysAdmin thought Jason had "IP Telepathy."

  • (cs) in reply to Skywing
    Skywing:
    Actually, the System Idle Process *can* take real CPU time.

    Kernel mode DPCs run in the idle process. The standard IDE/ATAPI driver does PIO operations with DPCs.

    Normally you wouldn't think this is an issue except for this little gem: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472

    I've had this happen twice to me. The first time was due to this bug: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;835152 (Apparently the NFS driver CPU spins at high IRQL, so it suppresses ATAPI's normal processing).

    The second time has got to be the stupidest thing ever; I put a scratched CDROM into my CD drive, which freaked out. This induced atapi.sys to set the IDE channel that my CDROM drive was on to PIO mode 0. Wonderful.

    There is actually someone (who was) running Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003???? This apparently was the only Version of Windows covered by the second KB.

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