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Idle is a state that a computer processor is in when it is not being used by any program. Every program or task that runs on a computer system occupies a certain amount of processing time on the CPU. If the CPU has completed all tasks it is idle.
However, the idle process does not use up computer resources (even when stated to be running at a high percent). Its CPU time "usage" is a measure of how much CPU time is not being used by other threads. In Windows 2000 and later the threads in the System Idle Process are also used to implement CPU power saving.
An idle computer has a load number of 0 (the idle process is not counted). Each process using or waiting for CPU (the ready queue or run queue) increments the load number by 1. Each process that terminates decrements it by 1. Most UNIX systems count only processes in the running (on CPU) or runnable (waiting for CPU) states.
The scheduler is an operating system module that selects the next jobs to be admitted into the system and the next process to run. Operating systems may feature up to three distinct scheduler types: a long-term scheduler (also known as an admission scheduler or high-level scheduler), a mid-term or medium-term scheduler, and a short-term scheduler.
Apple's macOS includes idle and sleep configuration settings through the Energy Saver System Preferences applet. [4] Likewise, Linux distributions include a variety of power management settings and tools. [5] There is a significant market in third-party PC power management software offering features beyond those present in the Windows operating ...
From the software standpoint, hardware support for multithreading is more visible to software, requiring more changes to both application programs and operating systems than multiprocessing. Hardware techniques used to support multithreading often parallel the software techniques used for computer multitasking. Thread scheduling is also a major ...
Users of such systems quickly become aware that for much of the time that a computer was allocated to a single user – for example, when a user was entering information or debugging programs – the processor was idle. Computer scientists observed that the overall performance of the machine could be improved by letting a different process use ...
In computer science and software engineering, busy-waiting, busy-looping or spinning is a technique in which a process repeatedly checks to see if a condition is true, such as whether keyboard input or a lock is available. Spinning can also be used to generate an arbitrary time delay, a technique that was necessary on systems that lacked a ...