When the CPU% is high, drilling down into the processes sometimes show System Idle Process as being 100%. Is Spotlight flagging high CPU because of System Idle Process? If so can System Idle Process be filtered out?
The Win32_PerfRawData_PerfOS_Processor class provides raw data from performance counters that monitor processor activity. CPU% average calculation comes directly from these performance counters. Spotlight does not get the data from individual processes and then extrapolate the final average based on its own algorithm. Rather, it presents what Microsoft already calculated.
Given the above, there are two points:
1. The information Microsoft presents to Spotlight to display is an average. So the CPU% from Spotlight is not based on one process going wild.
2. Any filtering of processes are not possible (or necessary due to reason 1) given the present architecture because Spotlight doesn't pull data of individual processes from customer written alforithm. Win32_PerfRawData_PerfOS_Processor provides Spotlight what is already calculated.
