Re: Is engaging the screensaver slowing down a download?

Wolfi wrote:
Am 10.08.07 09.45 schrieb Dave Yeo:
Wolfi wrote:
Am 09.08.07 20.13 schrieb Dave Yeo:
Wolfi wrote:
I just noticed something curious on my W4 FP17+ desktop box with APM 1.2, while downloading 2 CD isos in parallel, using wget.

It appeared, that each time when I disengaged Doodle's screen saver, which had started to display the Cairo clock just moments earlier, by using the keyboard, the d/l rate for both wget sessions, had dropped to below 40kB/s in each of them during that time period.

Before and after the screen saver being active, the rate was around 200kB/s for each of them. The XCenter IP-Monitor widget then also showed a downstream rate of around 400kB/s again.

On the first tab of the power object's settings I have "APM-BIOS and OS/2 Support active" and the last option within that frame checked

So, how is it possible, that the IP throughput drops so drastically, when the screen saver just engages?

Wolfi


How much CPU is the clock module using there? Here it uses very little.

How did you find out? When the screen saver engages, I cannot see any of my WPS CPU load indicators anymore

Let the clock screensaver start, wait a minute then move the mouse and look at the warpcenter cpu useage graph. Savers like snow spike the graph. The clock one barely registers here.

Ahh, of course. The SS's "Test" button on its 3. settings page actually makes that quite convenient.
It looks like Paul was right with his hunch. The Cairo clock seems to linger around high 80%, low to medium 90% CPU load, showing kind of a periodic ripple. Selecting just the black, blank screen brings the load down to some 30-something%.

Well, looks like I learned something for today.

As Paul mentioned it does run at regular priority. Seems that only the CPU intensive savers have an option for idle. You might want to email Doodle about the problem.

I only see similar drops, when I'm (re-)loading web pages or scroll a lot in Mozilla. This usually puts a 99% CPU load on the system for quite a while and also puts quite the brake on an ongoing d/l.

Strange, scrolling here in Mozilla and loading most pages doesn't cause a 99% load here. Of course pages with a lot of javascript do cause heavy use and those with transparent pngs bring the box to its knees.
I'm running a 700Mhz Duron, shouldn't be that much faster then your box

Here SM/FF, etc are really bad. Even only switching between different subscribed NGs or reading/replying to a posting/email, takes a some 4...10+s of straight lined 99.9% CPU load and it doesn't matter if the window then is minimized or otherwise hidden or not.
Apps like that are just sucking out the living electron out of each CPU cycle ;-)
In comparison to this behaviour here on my K6-2/500, web browsing with FF on an Athlon XP-2800 system, reloading f.e. an ebay search page only spikes for some 2sec to 99% and then it's done. The same on my K6 is about 35...45+s.

You should try uninstalling (temporary) all your plugins. I had very heavy CPU useage on newsgroups that I finally traced to a misconfigured Flash plugin (plugin was installed to the wrong directory, I had 2 groups of plugins at the time).
As for the clock issue Doodle would most likely be interested. It shouldn't be using that much CPU and it may be a Cairo issue. As the next versions of Mozilla apps and perhaps other apps will be based on Cairo it would be good to know if there is bugs with eg your setup.
I do have a standalone clock built upon a newer Cairo if you'd like to test that I could send it to you.
Dave
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