iTunes a resource hog?
 

I just noticed this today on my G4 at work. Its a G4 500Mhz w/ 768mb of RAM. I usually have these running: safari (or another web browser), mail application, itunes, and authoring software for burning cd's, usually toast. I haven't used it for much else than that. I downloaded a monitoring utility for fun last week to just see what all it did. It was saying itunes was consuming 13% of the CPU. Well I quit that app and went into the terminal and started pulling up what resources were going where. Sure enough itunes would be consuming anywhere from 10 to 12% of the cpu. Is that normal? I play music through itunes pretty much all day at work. Today I checked it again after rebooting the machine and I still get the same result. Should itunes eat up that much of my cpu?

seems normal
 

G4/500 sawtooth here. might be less heavy on bigger iron.

hmm thats kinda weird I wouldn't think itunes would take up that much resources.

well, it's doing a pretty amazing thing. no "stereo" equipment involved.

better performance is had with the player window closed while playing:
so, that indicates that the player window scrolly title and widgets get cycles, even when nothing is playing:
even if hidden, it swipes some mojo.

decoding mp3's or aac's
 

I imagine that you are playing MP3 or AAC encoded songs. If so, iTunes has to decode the song in order to play it. This accounts for the CPU load. I imagine that you would see a much smaller CPU load if you played a regular audio CD which does not require decoding.

aye. should have specified the above tops are all of itunes playing mp3 files.

There are a large variety of audio files on that machine. I guess I got kind of freaked when I saw it spike right under 20%, but for the most part its pretty steady between 10 and 12%; and I suppose if I had to do something processor intensive I could just do it with out music.

let her buck! idle CPU is wasted CPU.

One thing that just occured to me. What actual sound card is on a G4 logic board? I probably have better performance in different systems because of the sound card. I know that some of my sound cards decode audio so the CPU won't have to. Oh well this really is not that important I guess, I just kind of figured itunes would not take up that much resources.

macs don't have sound cards, per se, but onboard DSP chips, me thinks. still, the CPU, a la altivec, is obviously called on to decode.

it's rather impressive, to me, to have a heavy fink install going and the muzak never misses a beat. and still, other meaningful and meaningless work gets cycles.

Whamb is nice, can someone do a top using it - I wonder how it compares to iTunes.

sure i will check it out later for laughs.

whamb, hidden, playing mp3 file. can't not have player window open (?)

Merv beat me to it.

I like itunes its a great program. I just found it strange when it would spike a 20% cpu usage.

Laughs? Those numbers look good.. !

thanks mervTormel

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PS - there are skins available that are tiny, almost as good as hidden

Yeah but there is no player window open?

can't not have player window open

in whamb, i couldn't close the controller window. so, there's widgets eating cycles hidden or not.

CPU cycles while doing nothing
 

slightly on a tangent...

what pisses me off about iTunes is that it sucks up cycles when it's NOT playing, or doing anything but sitting quietly in the background.

(all the other Apple apps are very well behaved when doing nothing. it's just iTunes.)

iTunes definitely slows things down, probably Apple's way of getting people to want the 970s that should be out in June/July!

Yeah I used to think quicktime was a resource hog....

iTunes CPU load when idle
 

I believe that most of the CPU time taken by iTunes when it is "idle" is taken up in drawing the song status in the grey oval at the top. Note that there is very little CPU used if you click on a Playlist but don't start to play any songs. It is only after playing a song and then pausing it that there is significant "idle" CPU load. So if you are really that concerned about the (on my system) 3% CPU load from an "idle" iTunes, just click on a playlist after pausing playback.

Jacques, I assume you were joking about iTunes slowing things down since I don't think you will normally notice a 20% decrease in available CPU. (iTunes playing a song without visualizer takes up less than 20%) Sure if you stare at the CPU load numbers, you will see it, but not otherwise.

hayne,

ok. i launched iTunes and then did nothing. at the top of the iTunes window is nothing but the Apple logo - no scrolling text for song status.

in Top, i show iTunes processor usage oscilating between 0.6% and 1.8%.

(if i do pause a song, iTunes processor usage is much, much higher.)

this may seem insignificant, but i like to launch all the apps i'll be using after login and leave them running. if many of my apps averaged 1.2% CPU usage while doing nothing, i'd start having a slow machine.

(the other Apple apps, and many other well behaved apps, use 0.0% of CPU when doing nothing.)

Actually, hayne..

iTunes greediness hurts my system quite a bit. If I'm using iTunes to listen to MP3s in any fashion whatsoever - this old Bondi original iMac definitely gets hit and begins to mud the rest of my performance.

Whamb is much better at letting my computer go free, however it lacks in neary every other area really - so I don't really use it much.

On most systems (especially G4s and above) it may not even be noticable..

Jacques