Comments on: burning cpu and battery on the gnome desktop

By: Quim Gil

Quim Gil — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Ryan, one of my best discoveries of this GUADEC!

I’m no performance expert at all, just another user suggering the effects of non-optimized performance in my laptop. I like to read posts like this one of yours, though. Like I enjoy reading Ben Maurer’s or Federico’s.

Compared to releasing cool new features, optimization could be seen as a pretty boring and unnoticed effort. But you’re my heroes! Keep the good work going.

A happier user.

By: emmanuel

emmanuel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

this work is appreciated. performance is the thing were GNOME needs the most love right now… it’s great that GNOME came that far!

By: Wade Menard

Wade Menard — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t looked at the code but clock-applet is probably using the same ~1s timer to reduce delay in updating the minutes. Perhaps it could sync up to the next minute update then switch to a 60s sleep?

By: Jon Dowland

Jon Dowland — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for this post. I shall keep this list and look out for the patches :)

I tried stracing a very trivial GLADE-powered application I wrote (in ruby). It is going through an ioctl/gettimeofday/select loop when idle. The code I have written is so trivial, I’m thinking that there must be some bad stuff in either ruby or glade.

By: Andy Wingo

Andy Wingo — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Nice testing :)

By: mkv

mkv — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Excellent work! This kind of info and optimization is also probably going to be vital to the olpc effort.

By: Leen Toelen

Leen Toelen — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

For debugging these things, you should aybe give dtrace on opensolaris a try.

Nice work!

By: Nelson

Nelson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Great analysis!, I hope this post becomes a future GnomeGoal or SoC project, because these small(in appearance) details do really make a difference in the long term and wrt other desktops.

By: Kiddo

Kiddo — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’m amazed to see such good work going into optimization for GNOME, keep it up! :)

Out of curiosity, I tried stracing specto, and I don’t know how I should interpret the result. This application uses gobject timers to determine when to check for updates. I have thousands of lines like this scrolling up, because it seems to calculate the unix time all the time:

ioctl(15, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
gettimeofday({1154014114, 834950}, NULL) = 0

Should I be worried, or this is just plain normal? I noticed gaim has those, but MUCH less frequently.

By: desrt

desrt — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

kiddo; if you see lines after lines of those two things (without a poll, sleep, select, etc) in between them then you have trouble indeed. this means that your application is running in an infinite loop and never sleeping at all (ie: is pegging the cpu at 100%).

unless your app is actively doing work it shouldn’t be doing this.