[mythtv-users] Mythfrontend idle cpu consumption help

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Wed Nov 18 21:12:04 UTC 2009


On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Michael T. Dean
<mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> On 11/17/2009 05:23 PM, jansenj wrote:
>>>
>>> Perhaps using a theme that doesn't use alpha pulse?
>>
>> Are there any such themes for 0.22?
>
> Seems that Graphite, Mythbuntu, and G.A.N.T are using alpha pulse.  All
> non-G.A.N.T incarnations of default or default-wide do not use alpha pulse.

I think "alpha pulse" is a red herring.  All widgets on the screen are
being checked 70 times per second just to see if they need a pulse or
other kind of update.  The number of widgets is theme-dependent and
may be quite high.  For the Watch Recordings screen of the Blue
Abstract theme, strace indicated over 2000 file accesses (for checking
whether the cached version is valid), so I assume there are at least
that many widgets being checked 70 times per second for pulse/update.
If there are actually one or two widgets being updated for alpha
pulse, I expect that extra cost to be low relative to the overall time
spent checking 2000+ widgets.

So I would think that "theme complexity", in terms of number of
widgets, would be a more accurate predictor of CPU utilization.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to evaluate the complexity of the
various screens of the various themes.

Jim


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