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asherman13

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 31, 2005
914
0
SF Bay Area, CA
I'm using iStat Nano (the widget) on my MBP, and for some reason the "Nice" category of CPU usage (the red one) is huge right now. Can anybody tell me why? :confused:
 
You are most likely running something that is nice in the background. This isn't something you should worry about under normal circumstances.
Nice is some sort of priority system for the CPU (on *nix systems). For example, if a program has a high level of this niceness and takes 75% CPU power, it will consume those cycles normally. But if another process is started and requires 50% CPU power, the latter process will have priority and thus get all the cycles it needs.
An example of this are those @home applications (seti@home, folding@home) that work in the background, but I don't know if they utilize the actual niceness system or some other thing.

...I think.
 
Kaioshin said:
You are most likely running something that is nice in the background. This isn't something you should worry about under normal circumstances.
Nice is some sort of priority system for the CPU (on *nix systems). For example, if a program has a high level of this niceness and takes 75% CPU power, it will consume those cycles normally. But if another process is started and requires 50% CPU power, the latter process will have priority and thus get all the cycles it needs.
An example of this are those @home applications (seti@home, folding@home) that work in the background, but I don't know if they utilize the actual niceness system or some other thing.

...I think.

My Alarm Clock widget appears to be doing this...

...I tried to upload an attachment (a pic of my activity monitor) but I got this message:

Safari can’t open the page “http://att.macrumors.com/newattachment.php”. The error was: “POSIX error: Invalid argument” (NSPOSIXErrorDomain:22) Please choose Report Bug to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

Could FileVault protection be causing this failure to upload?
 
So I shut down for the evening and restarted and it's happening again! :eek:

What can I do to stop this "Nice" processor usage? I'm not running anything in the background (i.e folding@home or seti@home) except for Quicksilver...

Anybody?

EDIT "Nice" is currently using around 50% of my CPUs...
 
Even nice CPU usage can have an adverse effect on laptop batteries. But even if that is not the case, it is nice* to be able to control this.

If it's the Alarm clock widget, do you have to use it? If so, what kind of processor does your mac have and is the widget a universal application, that is, is it running through Rosetta. And finally, is there another widget with the same functionality you can try to see if it behaves better?

*no pun intended.
 
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