[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]> I'd appreciate an explanation of the usage vs loading thing. I guess I don't fully understand. I think you're basically saying that just
> because it says 99%, that it isn't necessarily monopolizing all the CPU time? If so, I kind of demonstrated that to myself earlier by
> trying to load a web page while downloading Pegasus mail, and the 99% went down to like 50% or something. So it's not like it grinds the
> computer to a halt. The main reason I was concerned, was that the fan on my laptop almost NEVER comes on, but I've noticed that any time I
> get mail via Pegasus, that the fan would come on, which made me think that the CPU was working harder.
Generally a CPU runs all the time, it never stops until the system goes to sleep. If you look at the task manager you'll see a process called "System idle Process" running that is getting a lot of the CPU most of the time. This percentage used by this process is not shown when you see the processor usage.
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OK, I guess we were saying the same thing in different ways. I was originally talking about the process list in the task manager, in which the idle process is normally 99%, but whenever I read Pegasus mail, the idle process goes down to ZERO, and Pegasus becomes 99%. If I do something else like grab a web page while downloading mail, the Pegasus usage dropped to around 50% (if I remember right). I can't remember what the other 50% was, but I assume it was SeaMonkey. I'm sure that the idle process never went above zero until the mail download completed.
Once I used the command line trick you suggested, (thanks again) Pegasus will now jump up to 99% just for a second, then drop down to near zero while the mail is downloading, which is the way most programs behave, and the way it works on my wife's computer, so that seems to have corrected the situation. It seems to me as if the Pegasus process had somehow been given too high a priority, or perhaps I may have created the shortcut myself, and didn't use the proper command line switches. I'll have to look at my wife's computer to see what her command line looks like. I wrote some very simple VB communications programs that also used 90+% of the CPU time even though they didn't really need it, which I fixed by changing the way I used interrupts to watch for events, but I've never quite understood how to set process priorities in windows.
[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]
> I did try the above command line suggestion, and it DID bring the CPU usage down to expected levels, which makes me feel better, even though it's probably not changing much about the computer function. HOWEVER, it didn't change the fact that the fan still comes on every time I get mail. I think my old computer is just too bloated with services that aren't necessary. I should probably just start over and re-format and re-load the OS.
> Thanks for the command line suggestion. That's interesting.
All that is happening is that Pegasus Mail is passing to the system idle process the time waiting for the other end to answer the blocking call. The download is going a bit slower since each end is waiting for the other to respond before sending the next block. You'll probably not notice the difference though in download time since this is only milliseconds.
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Well NOW, you've got me thinking.....
Up until a year or so ago, I was connected via dialup, which was slow, but the latency was very low, ie pings of just a few milliseconds like you say. However NOW, I am using WildBlue, and sometimes HughesNet. With WildBlue, pings usually take about 1300 milliseconds to come back, and sometimes it gets up to 5 or 10 seconds. I'm half wondering whether the CPU usage issue I was observing was due to the long latency issues with WildBlue? Perhaps Pegasus doesn't release the excess CPU time since it is always waiting for responses from the sat internet?
With my browsers, I have options that allow me to go through the Wild Blue proxy, which I think speeds things up via sending back artificial replies, but I don't think there is any way to tell Pegasus to use the proxy. This may be why when I download mail via my browser's (SeaMonkey) mail client, that I didn't have the CPU issue, since it uses the proxy.
I still have my dialup account, so I'll have to experiment to see if I don't have that issue when connected through dialup.
Re download times, I have noticed that if I download mail via dialup, that download times with Pegasus are MUCH faster using dialup, again probably related to the satellite latency. I also have an application with an imbedded FTP program, that takes about 8 times longer to upload the same data via satellite than it does via dialup, so this satellite internet has wildly different affects on different applications.
Thanks. This is interesting.
