Python on windows - conhost.exe CPU usage

Question

I'm running a Python script on Windows, and I've noticed that even though the Python process takes ~8% CPU, the associated conhost.exe process takes ~14%.

Why is this so? How come such a large part of the CPU consumption is in the conhost and not in the Python process?
Is there a way to reduce this CPU consumption? (besides optimizing the code of course)

UPDATE 1: Win7 64bit, Python 2.6.6

UPDATE 2: The Python program uses a C++ package via SWIG Python bindings. The C++ package (quickfix) does I/O with the network quite a bit (1), it also prints to the console (2). The Python code prints to several files (3). Which if these three should be suspect?

Answer 1

Since we don't know what your program is doing we have to guess a little. So long as there is no I/O I'd expect conhost to consume 0% CPU. So I hypothesise that you are printing a lot of text to the console. For example, the following program has the same symptoms as you report:

while True:
    print "Hello world!"