iTunes's CPU Usage Too High!
Now that iTunes is in the limelight again and is now at the center of a grand music strategy, Apple seriously needs to address the CPU usage issue: it is just unacceptably high by any standards. On my iBook 700 Mhz it uses 15% average with peaks to 25% at times, and that's with iTunes 4 which is supposed to decrease CPU usage. 15% for what is just an MP3 player for Pit's sake!!
Ridiculous when one knows that WinAmp, and even worse, Windows Media Player, consume in the vicinity of a few percent points on my PC PII 266 Mhz, and ~1% on a P4 1.8 Ghz.
iTunes is destined to become an ever more pervasive part of the Mac OS X experience than ever before. Hence it is getting even more urgent to fix this asap.
This is made even worse by the fact that there isn't a single reasonable reason for this sad state of affairs: no sound card on the Mac? So? Do Macs have no dedicated sound processing chip or ASIC whatsoever?? If so, that's pathetic: what's Apple waiting for to add one?? Even assuming so, I seriously doubt that sound cards on the PC perform MP3 decoding as well as sound synthesis, and most processing time goes into MP3 decoding when playing an MP3.
So as usual we are left with that odd contradictory impression of nicely executed software with subpar performance, so characteristic of Apple since the release of Mac OS X.
It really can't be that hard to write a fast optimized MP3 decoder when there are so many around already especially on Windows, so please Apple get to work already!
Ridiculous when one knows that WinAmp, and even worse, Windows Media Player, consume in the vicinity of a few percent points on my PC PII 266 Mhz, and ~1% on a P4 1.8 Ghz.
iTunes is destined to become an ever more pervasive part of the Mac OS X experience than ever before. Hence it is getting even more urgent to fix this asap.
This is made even worse by the fact that there isn't a single reasonable reason for this sad state of affairs: no sound card on the Mac? So? Do Macs have no dedicated sound processing chip or ASIC whatsoever?? If so, that's pathetic: what's Apple waiting for to add one?? Even assuming so, I seriously doubt that sound cards on the PC perform MP3 decoding as well as sound synthesis, and most processing time goes into MP3 decoding when playing an MP3.
So as usual we are left with that odd contradictory impression of nicely executed software with subpar performance, so characteristic of Apple since the release of Mac OS X.
It really can't be that hard to write a fast optimized MP3 decoder when there are so many around already especially on Windows, so please Apple get to work already!
Comments
Originally posted by BuzzardsBay
How can I check CPU usage?
Open ProcessViewer.