When I have DEVONagent running with nothing active (all windows closed, application hidden), I can see in Activity Monitor that it is consuming a steady 1.0 to 2.5% of my computer CPU – all the time. Is this a bug, or is DEVONagent doing something smart in the background? DEVONthink is completely quiet when I’m not using it, which is definitely my preference. Some of the apps I run demand all the CPU I can give them, and unfortunately that means I can’t keep DEVONagent running and ready for whenever I need it…
Right now I’ve got 4 web pages and my Archive (over 13,500 items) open. Granted, I’m using a test version with Tabs, so only 1 Web page is ‘active’. Activity monitor shows 0.60% CPU usage.
DT Pro (8 windows open) also shows 0.60% CPU usage, as does Entourage.
So none of these apps individually makes much CPU demand at the moment. Even in their aggregate, Activity Monitor itself is a greater CPU load. And of course there are always some OS processes running at any one time, in addition.
So there’s a good deal of CPU resources available for a photo editing job, for example. But if I were going to render a movie, I would close everything else while doing that.
Of course, CPU resources vary by computer. My TiBook has a 500 MHz CPU with 1 GB RAM. My PowerMac dual core 2.3 GHz with 5 GB RAM can handle more processes than the TiBook.
Even so, I would close everything else for a big rendering job.
I’m just used to inactive apps takes 0%. I have 64 processes running at the moment, and except for the top 5 (which average < 3%, mostly I think because Activity Monitor is making the system busy), everything else take 0%.
I’ve seen DA take an average of 2.5% for quite a long while, so this made me wonder why it was so busy.
Thanks for the quick response! My girlfriend and I are loving DA+DT,
John
Ok, I had thought DEVONagent would remain mildly quiescent when not in use (no windows open, app backgrounded). That way it’s available for quick web searches whenever I need it.
But today, as I was looking at Activity Monitor to watch Virtual PC, I saw that DEVONagent was consuming all available CPU time! And it just kept doing so. I left it for several minutes, but it was pegging 60-90% CPU consistently.
I did a capture using the “sample” utility so that you could see what might be going on:
Disabling Internet plugins (see menu “Web” or preferences) should fix this - according to the log a plugin (maybe a Flash animation?) was consuming the CPU time. In the end, the WebKit, Java applets or Internet plugins might “leak” but DEVONagent does not.
