The phrase "almost idle" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a state of being nearly inactive or not engaged in any significant activity.
Example: "During the summer months, the factory was almost idle, with only a few workers maintaining the equipment."
Alternatives: "nearly inactive" or "virtually unused".
Government bonds were steady in almost idle conditions.
However, by 2012 most new desalination plants along the Mediterranean coast remained almost idle.
He didn't go down, and instead just dabbed at his wound with the almost idle curiosity of Javier Bardem playing with his broken arm in No Country For Old Men.
Suddenly, the world's chip factories (known as "fabs", or fabrication plants) stand almost idle.The pain is showing.
It achieves better load balancing by allowing a computing node to steal some tasks from others when becoming almost idle.
Nevertheless, Brill's first-person narration maintains an even, almost idle, tone as each member of the family does something or other to pass the days.
"Time-use surveys suggest [these men] are almost entirely idle," Eberstadt wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed a few weeks ago.
That means letting the motor run very slowly, almost at idle, providing an insistent and unpleasant throbbing noise and occasional puffs of drifting blue smoke.
In operating these facilities, a critical objective is to manage overtime, part-time workers, and temporaries so that when volumes are high, additional costs are kept to a minimum, and when volumes are low the permanent workforce is almost never idle.
He may be one of the politicians most identified with change and modernity in the world today, but he too is at heart a pen and paper man, the computer on his desk almost as idle as the one I used to have on mine.
A huge band of spectrum doled out in the 1960s sits almost entirely idle, used on occasion to distribute videos to schools and similar fare yet is twice as wide as the slice of airwaves shared by 20 million users of Wi-Fi, the hottest new wireless industry.
