eli5 – Why pc lag or slow down when severals apps are open but the cpu and memory are not used at 100%?

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I know that this might vary from case to case, depending on which PC and which app I have open, among other factors. However, I noticed that with all that I had open, regardless of the apps or games running, when the PC starts to slow down or lag, the CPU or memory is not used at 100%, but stays between 70% and 90% depending on the situation. What could be the reason?

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7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

70-90% is pretty heavy usage

It’s possible the apps at fault are unable to use multiple CPU cores (multi-threading) so they are pinning (maxing out) a single CPU core.

If you have 4 cores, and one is completely pinned Windows will only report your CPU as 25% utilized.

Your hard drive is also commonly a bottleneck. If you see very slow performance when loading apps, or running an application but CPU usage is low then it’s possible that your Hard drive is unable to keep up.

The single greatest performance improvement in PC hardware these days is replacing a spinning hard disk with an NVMe SSD

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