Some more observations: xfce4-panel, firefox

Some more observations: xfce4-panel, firefox

Posted Jul 23, 2006 0:09 UTC (Sun) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324)
Parent article: OLS: On how user space sucks

Inspired by the above article, I went to check the first programs in the cpu ordered top-list on my system. Although I realize the point of the article was more generic, it may be an interesting excercise to try this on your own system. My system is running a recently updated debian unstable with kernel 2.6.17-1-k7.

xfce4-panel: average 2% cpu usage. A strace of approximately 10 seconds shows 267 function calls to gettimeofday, and 141 to ioctl and poll.

firefox: average just over 2% cpu usage. A strace of approximately 10 seconds shows 594 calls to gettimeofday, 151 calls to poll, read and ioctl, 282 calls to futex. I have no idea why it calls gettimeofday 4 times in a row in every cycle.

Apparently cpu-unintensive polling is a more common problem than I thought it would be. Is using gettimeofday, ioctl and poll the common way to do this?

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