Youtube Video = 50% CPU

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Oubadah

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Ultimate Geek

#87975 12-Aug-2011 00:04

I've been messing around with this old HP NX5000 lappy. It uses a Pentium M "Banias" processor (which I'm not familiar with) running at 1.5GHz. It's very old, and I'm not expecting much, but is it normal for 50% of that CPU to be occupied with a single Youtube video?

By the way, Diablo II has it's CPU usage at 100% permanently - I'm surprised there have been no major hitches during gameplay... It must be right on the brink. :D

Ragnor

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#505283 12-Aug-2011 00:23

Doesn't sound that strange, what web browser were you using? You could test with Google Chrome which ships with a custom version of Adobe Flash inbuilt and doesn't use the version installed on the system. Might be an interesting comparison.

Oubadah

676 posts

Ultimate Geek

#505291 12-Aug-2011 02:19

In Chrome it stabilises at about 65%. If I go fullscreen it's around 90%.

I'm wondering how was this laptop ever useful... I mean, I've just reformatted it with XP x86 (which is what it was shipped with), and with nothing but drivers and MSE installed it was idling with 230 of it's 256MB of RAM occupied. That meant it was hammering the virtual RAM, and MSE took 3 minutes just to start. The thing was completely unusable until I threw in a spare 512MB stick I had lying around.

The thing is I have memories of this same laptop being usable in it's stock state (256MB and all) back when it was first purchased, so does that mean XP (with it's new service packs) has become more resource hungry over the years?

freitasm

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Geekzone

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#505314 12-Aug-2011 08:00

Oubadah: I'm wondering how was this laptop ever useful... I mean, I've just reformatted it with XP x86 (which is what it was shipped with), and with nothing but drivers and MSE installed it was idling with 230 of it's 256MB of RAM occupied. That meant it was hammering the virtual RAM, and MSE took 3 minutes just to start. The thing was completely unusable until I threw in a spare 512MB stick I had lying around.

It was useful in an age when YouTube videos were not HD and the browsers didn't have an architecture of an operating system inside themselves.

Things change. The IBM PC XT with 640 Kbytes was useful. The Apple IIe was useful. and so on.

Shoes2468

785 posts

Ultimate Geek

#505315 12-Aug-2011 08:03

Oubadah: In Chrome it stabilises at about 65%. If I go fullscreen it's around 90%.

I'm wondering how was this laptop ever useful... I mean, I've just reformatted it with XP x86 (which is what it was shipped with), and with nothing but drivers and MSE installed it was idling with 230 of it's 256MB of RAM occupied. That meant it was hammering the virtual RAM, and MSE took 3 minutes just to start. The thing was completely unusable until I threw in a spare 512MB stick I had lying around.

The thing is I have memories of this same laptop being usable in it's stock state (256MB and all) back when it was first purchased, so does that mean XP (with it's new service packs) has become more resource hungry over the years?

Yes I would recommend at bare minimum xp with 512mb ram, 768mb seems to be acceptable IMO. the services packs and updates really seem to make quite a difference to the ram usage plus the heavier weight applications such as ie8 compared to ie6 etc etc. I also notice a huge jump in CPU usage for anything flash based, on older machines, I too would recommend Chrome browser as it is a little more lightweight.

gzt

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#505482 12-Aug-2011 13:10

Speedstep can be related to cpu pegging and crap performance in some circumstances. Certainly was when it first came out. Turn it all the way off (bios) and see if it makes a difference for the areas you identified.

Also, if you can be security conscious you might drop whatever security package suite you are using and just rely on relatively passive blocking the built in firewall + the limited WU scan, and relatively passive browser protection like spybot.

Interested to know how it goes.

Oubadah

676 posts

Ultimate Geek

#505568 12-Aug-2011 14:44

gzt: Speedstep can be related to cpu pegging and crap performance in some circumstances. Certainly was when it first came out. Turn it all the way off (bios) and see if it makes a difference for the areas you identified.

Also, if you can be security conscious you might drop whatever security package suite you are using and just rely on relatively passive blocking the built in firewall + the limited WU scan, and relatively passive browser protection like spybot.

Interested to know how it goes.

I've disabled Speedstep and I can't see any difference, although when it was enabled I never saw any evidence to suggest that it was active. The CPU clock was always at 1.5GHz.

I tried Diablo (the original), and it too tops out CPU usage when it's running. o_O I don't quite understand how both games are running without major slowdowns if the CPU is so stretched.

I notice that MsMpEng.exe (the process) often jumps up and starts using 100% of the CPU for ~1 minute immediately after I exit Diablo II. This is an agent of MSE. I thought it might also be running with the game and causing the high usage, but even when I disabled it Diablo II still used 100% CPU.

Oubadah

676 posts

Ultimate Geek

#505630 12-Aug-2011 16:20

I've uninstalled MSE, so no more MsMpEng.exe mischief.

- Diablo still uses 100% CPU
- Diablo II still uses 100% CPU
- Youtube videos still use 50-70% CPU

However, idle (desktop) RAM usage dropped from 230MB to ~150MB.

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gzt

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#505636 12-Aug-2011 16:48

This guy used a process throttler on Diablo.

With the flash cpu usage, there is a firefox extension FlashVideoReplacer which lets you to use a player of your choice for video. No idea which is the best for CPU usage, but MPlayer is the usual choice. I think that would be your best shot. Try that first.

YouTube has some additional options: the Feather beta and the HTML5 WEBM h264 beta. h264 could be more cpu intensive than the flash player but it might be interesting to try.

Oubadah

676 posts

Ultimate Geek

#505727 12-Aug-2011 19:57

Wow, in all my years of playing Diablo, I was never aware of that bug. I guess always running powerful PCs I've never had reason to look at the CPU usage. That and the fact that DII is capped at 25fps or something stupid The worst part is that Blizzard hasn't even fixed it yet - what is this... the thirteenth patch for Christ's sake!

Anyway, I guess the Diablo games were the worst possible candidates for gauging performance! :D Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

gzt

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#505730 12-Aug-2011 20:11

I am not a player, but you should know about the various Glide wrappers (gives you hardware ac) and the unofficial hack hi-res patch.

Oubadah

676 posts

Ultimate Geek

#505759 12-Aug-2011 21:04

The problem with that high res patch was that the sound effect radius was not increased to match the large resolutions. So if a projectile hits a foe at the edge of the screen you don't hear anything. Looks great though.

kyhwana2

2566 posts

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#505760 12-Aug-2011 21:07

Most "older" games will max out whatever core they're running on, thats normal :)

Oubadah

676 posts

Ultimate Geek

#505764 12-Aug-2011 21:18

kyhwana2: Most "older" games will max out whatever core they're running on, thats normal :)

Yes, they'll usually be CPU bound due to only supporting one thread, and there will be a lot of usage on one core, but not this kind of absolutely flat graph at 100%. And this is Diablo II... There's not a hell of a lot going on in there! No, there is definitely a bug present in this case.