High idle & cpu usage

Greetings,

My MBP is averaging 55% CPU usage and 47% idle for basic use (currently only using firefox with 8 tabs open). I have been troubleshooting some basic recommendations for firefox but still no luck?

Are these figures somewhat high?

Any recommendations on how to decrease?

Specs: MBP 17", 2.4 GHz, 2 gb memory. OS X 10.5.8
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On a side note I've also been troubleshooting CPU temperatures (currently averaging 80 deg.) but have figured out this seems to be the norm, running smcfancontrol - FYI just incase this could be linked to the high CPU usage.

Thanks in advance,

Bon

Do you run any antivirus (pointlessly) in the background? iAntivirus owns a lot of stuff. Either way, try opening Activity Monitor and see what is using the highest percentage of your cpu use. That will help.

Hi DR - Thanks for the reply,

No - no antivirus running, I've been keeping an eye on activity monitory and firefox is running 94 mb Real Memory and 1.02 gb Virtual Memory,

Asides from Firefox the next highest is activity monitor running 16mb Real Memory and 969mb Virtual.

My CPU usage is still above 50% and Idle 48%,

Do these figures weigh up?

Cheers
Bon

Can you send us a screen shot of activity monitor ( ALL processes ) .... that would remove some of the guess work and reduce the amount of questions.

Cheers ... McBie

Mcbie - screen shot of activity monitor enclosed,

Thanks!

Bon

Look at the virtual memory usage in your screenshot. It's like GB's of virtual memory used per Application process. And as we know VM is just Hard Drive space iused as pretend memory. And it takes more processing power to write to and from the Hard Disk all the time if there is a lot of VM being used at the time.

How much memory is in your Macintosh? Maybe it's time you bought yourself a memory upgrade. Then you'd be using all the new memory and not writing to the hard disk for virtual memory all the time.

Well ask other users here for a 2nd opition on my suggestion first though. But that's what I think could be the issue there.

Memory specs are: 2 gb 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

And crucial report is:
# Maximum Memory Capacity: 4096MB
# Available Memory Slots: 2
# Total Memory Slots: 2
# Dual Channel Support: Yes
# CPU Manufacturer:
# CPU Family: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
# CPU Speed: 2400 MHz

And if Activity Monitor -> System Memory helps i've enclosed

Thanks

Thanks for this.

And too another thing if there is not enough free hard disk space for the virtual memory or you total free hard drive space (which is total space minus files on your HD minus the VM currently used) gets low then maybe you have a Ram issue liek I said in my above post.

Though is saying this I had 2GB ram in my computer for a long time before I recently got 1 more GB to 3GB. But when I had 2 GB my computer ran pretty much fine sure with a hard game and some other apps I got a tinsey slowdown but with 3GB no slowdown. I'm not 100% convinced it is a ram issue but it could be. Just keep an eye on it and see how your computer runs with one app open then two then 3 etc. Test it out to see when the problem pops up again.

Bon.Scott said:

Mcbie - screen shot of activity monitor enclosed,

Thanks!

Bon

Click to expand...

I noticed something on the screenshot, maybe I was not totally clear when I requested the screenshot
Can you do activity monitor again and select " All processes " in the upper right hand corner instead of " my processes "

Maybe we are overlooking something.

You might need 2 screenshots to capture the complete list.

Cheers ... McBie

Thanks for your help guys,

Screen shot of 'All processes' enclose