process wakeups

Ulrich Drepper drepper at redhat.com
Mon Jul 14 21:57:56 UTC 2008


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One of the worst problems wrt energy savings we have today are all the
wakeups processes request.  This is not just an issue for laptops, it
relevant everywhere.

To see the size of the problem run the attached systemtap script.  On my
laptop I see the following output (47 secs runtime):

  uid | poll select  epoll itimer  futex nanosle signal| process
29799 |15941   7971      0      0      0       0      0| npviewer.bin
29841 |  253      0      0      0   1531       0      0| thunderbird-bin
 3017 |  447      0      0      0      0       0      0| pulseaudio
 2467 |   76      0      0      0      0       0      0| hald
 2471 |    8      0      0      0      0       0      0| hald-runner
 2620 |   58      0      0      0      0       0      0| NetworkManager
13174 |  214      0      0      0      0       0      0| stapio
 3044 |   48      0      0      0      0       0      0| gnome-panel
 9115 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| nm-vpnc-service
 3112 |   32      0      0      0      0       0      0| gpk-update-icon
 3108 |   24      0      0      0      0       0      0| nm-applet
 3052 |  274      0      0      1      0       0      0| gnome-terminal
 3115 |   29      0      0      0      0       0      0| gnome-power-man
 3055 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| bluetooth-apple
 3093 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| krb5-auth-dialo
 2633 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| gdm-binary
 2724 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| gdm-simple-slav
 2630 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| nm-system-setti
 2470 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| console-kit-dae
 2385 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| avahi-daemon
 2397 |   16      0      0      0      0       0      0| libvirtd
 2725 |   63    214      0      4      0       0      0| Xorg
 2150 |   42      0      0      0      0       0      0| setroubleshootd
 3010 |   47      0      0      0      0       0      0| gnome-settings-
 3040 |  111      0      0      0      0       0      0| metacity
 3526 |   37      0      0      0      0       0      0| notification-da
 3085 |   49      0      0      0      0       0      0| wnck-applet
 3043 |   50      0      0      0      0       0      0| gnome-screensav
 3042 |   26      0      0      0      0       0      0| nautilus
 3050 |    8      0      0      0      0       0      0| evince
 9120 |    0      5      0      0      0       0      0| vpnc
 3342 |   11      0      0      0      0       0      0| clock-applet
 3329 |    0      6      0      0      0       0      0| pam_timestamp_c
 2337 |    0      7      0      0      0       0      0| sendmail
 2132 |    0      0      0      0     33       0      0| automount
 2958 |    0      3      0      0      0       0      0| ssh-agent
 2118 |    1      0      0      0      0       0      0| dbus-daemon
 5732 |    1      0      0      0      0       0      0| gnome-vfs-daemo
29394 |   68    131      0      0     65       0      0| firefox
 2105 |    1      0      0      0      0       0      0| audispd
 1979 |    0      1      0      0      0       0      0| rsyslogd


As you can see, not all programs are equally bad and proprietary ones
(here: flash) are the worst.

Still, since the script records wakeups due to timeouts almost all
mentions on this list are bad.  Programs should be woken based on
events.  They shouldn't poll data (which is what usually happens after a
timeout).

I would hope the package maintainers can find some time and look at the
issues.  Maybe at least document them in a BZ.  I might try to do the
latter myself but given the large number of packages involved I'll most
likely be able to cover just a few packages.  IMO it should be a release
criteria that a program does use polling.

- --
➧ Ulrich Drepper ➧ Red Hat, Inc. ➧ 444 Castro St ➧ Mountain View, CA ❖
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