Saturday, August 25, 2007

I've Been Waiting for a Widget Like You

For a while now, I've been using CPU monitoring widgets (to read more about widgets, go to my previous post). Problem was, none of them took into account the fact that I had dual CPUs (well, not really, I have an Intel Dual Core 2, but from the operating system's point-of-view, I may well be using 2 CPUs).
Finally, there's a widget called Multiple Processor Monitor that can monitor both.
Why is it important? Because some applications tie themselves to a single CPU (a feature called "affinity") and drive that CPU's usage up. The widget allows me to focus on the "culprit".

BTW, to set the affinity of a process manually, open Task Manager (ctrl+shift+esc), switch to the processes tab, right click a process and select "Set Affinity". This would allow you to tie a specific process to a specific CPU. Affinity can, of course, be set programmatically if you're the developer.

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