Whatever you use is a bit meaningless imho. 100% CPU utilisation (in a single CPU system) simply means that there is some process (or processes) running that is not specifically giving up time slice or which is/are not waiting on other resources such as IO etc.
In theory it could be a single CPU-bound process "consuming" all available CPU time, but it is only able to do so because no other process is demanding a share of that available time. Any CPU bound process will appear to consume ALL available CPU time, because in the absence of any other demand on CPU time, that is what it will get, whether it strictly speaking "needs" it or not. So whether such a process is "important" or not is an entirely different question, and whether adding another CPU-bound process to the system will result in "overload" is by no means certain. And I don't think there is any reliable way to determine that. To get a meaningful idea of system "load" you would probably need to take into account a whole host of other factors... overall system memory use, virtual memory paging statistics etc etc. All of which is possible using system performance counters, but ultimately still not entirely reliable and depending on why you are doing it, quite possibly not worth the trouble (and you may run the risk that your algorithm never finds a "quiet enough" time to allow your process to get going). -----Original Message----- From: delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz] On Behalf Of John Bird Sent: Thursday, 20 August 2009 15:59 To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List Subject: [DUG] CPU usage Is there a simple way to find simple measure of current CPU usage? Reason - have some housekeeping tasks that I would prefer to not run if the computer is loaded at the moment, so an easy way to check before starting it would be great. Does not have to be too precise for my case, basically something that answers "is the computer really busy or mainly idle at the moment?" Here is a couple of examples I found - wondering if there is a simpler call for XP/Vista/Windows 7 http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/torry/showcode.php?id=969 http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=343530 John _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: unsubscribe _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: unsubscribe
