Why do my processes only consume 5% of the processors power?

Question

Not sure if this is the appropriate place for this question, but it seems related to threading and system resources and all that.

Why Does my Task Manager show that the System Idle Process is using 90%+ of the CPU power when I have 3 different processes going!?!?

Is it because of I/O bottlenecks?

For example, if I do an SVN checkout, and empty my recycle bin, and browse the web at the same time, why is the System Idle process at 97%, and the other processes around 1% each? None of them seem to actually be going very fast.

Answer 1

Mostly the processes are waiting for disk or network operations to complete, or waiting for user input.

You might think you have a fast disk or network connection, but compared to memory/cpu it's like walking to the nearest library, looking up a book in the catalog and finding it on the shelf vs already having the book in your hand.

This is why you pay thousands or dollars for 10,000 and 15,000 rpm scsi drives (or even more for SANs) on high performance servers.