"System" - NOT "System Idle Process" - is taking up a lot of CPU

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BenWins39

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Dec 20, 2013
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I've been looking for an answer for this, but most of the results are from people who are confused about "System Idle Process" not being an actual program. I got very tired of looking through the endless stream of unhelpful Search results - Or maybe I'm just oblivious.

I have a six-core processor, AMD FX-6300. When I first built the computer (about two weeks ago), it would idle at 2% CPU use.

Now, however, my "System" process is always at 17% (which is approximately 1/6th of 100%, or approximately one entire core in my processor) of my total CPU usage (though Task Manager's Performance tab shows it distributed across three of them). And, in case it is relevant, System only seems to use "88 K" of Memory.
My total RAM use appears to be normal, and all of my other programs idle at 00%-01% CPU under Task Manager.

The "System" process rarely fluctuates from "17", and when it does, it goes to "16", and then right back up to "17" again. It appears to be the only thing doing ANYTHING on my ENTIRE computer when I am idling, and it is ALWAYS active. It has not come down from 16-17% for the last two days, most of which I have spent trying to find a solution.

Since I do have six cores, this isn't as much of a problem for me as it would be for somebody on a single-core (in which case it would likely be 100% of their CPU), but I would still very much like to get this fixed.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thanks!
 
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scottiemedic

scottiemedic

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Feb 10, 2010
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You have to remember everything running in the background, display, network, disk I/O, sound, backups, drivers, etc etc etc. These all require constant tweaking, corrections, actions that eat CPU and memory. I wouldn't be overly concerned. Though is does seem a little high, you can start systematically turning off anything in your systray and see if you can find a culprit, or non essential services...
 
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thecakeisalie

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Jul 4, 2014
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I'm having a similar problem. I'm on Windows 8.1 x64 and the process titled 'system' is eating all of my disk time or whatever the thing is called under the disk tab of task man. Just to clarify it is not disk space but access to the disk itself is slowing down because of the process hogging it.
 
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Pinhedd

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Aug 7, 2007
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System Idle Process is an actual process. It's a special unblockable process that occupies the lowest possible scheduling priority level (0). SIP has one kernel thread per logical processor, and each kernel thread has the lowest possible priority. These are the only threads allowed to have priority level 0. That's not really important though.

System is an umbrella process that runs other kernel threads spawned by device drivers and the kernel itself. These are used primarily to execute operations asynchronously with respect to system calls made by user-mode applications.
For example, inbound traffic on an NIC is queued up in the NIC's buffers. The NIC generates an interrupt which wakes a network traffic handling thread that belongs to the kernel. The thread copies data from the NIC's buffers to the TCP/IP stack where it is then sorted and sent to the appropriate socket.

Some antivirus products use drivers to create threads under the kernel, so these will also be accounted for under the System process.

NOTE: There's a difference between a kernel thread and a system thread. Kernel threads include all threads that are managed by the kernel for the purposes of scheduling on logical processors. System threads are kernel threads that are spawned by the kernel or device drivers.

Try each of these in order.

1. uninstall all anti-virus and anti-malware products

2. update all drivers

3. reformat. You may have a rootkit or some other nasty piece of software running in kernel space. If this is the case, everything on your computer is suspect.
 
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